Maintaining your IP Portfolio

By Maarten Roos 

To maintain the exclusive rights to IP, an organization must have the mechanisms in place to guarantee continued protection.

First of all, someone must ensure that registered IP rights maintain their validity. Trademarks are registered for 10 years at a time, thus registrations should be extended before the ending of such a validity period. Failure to do so will result in the loss of all exclusive rights to the trademark. Domain names are cheap and easy to register, but a maintenance fee must be paid. Granted patents and designs will have a non-extendable validity of 10 years (for design and utility model patents) or 20 years (for invention) from the filing date, but an annuity must be paid each year to ensure continued validity. Read the rest of “Protection vs. Enforcement: Where to start your China IPR Strategy? Part II” or post a comment

By Maarten Roos

The continued pervasiveness of counterfeiting in China is not only a problem of law, but also one of enforcement. While China’s laws and regulations conform to the agreement on trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPS) and other widely accepted international principles, certain parts of China’s protection mechanism have proven ineffective. Common examples are the high standards for criminal liability of counterfeiters, the high burden of evidence to prove bad faith registrations, and the difficulty to prove damages in civil proceedings. On the other hand, it is abundantly clear that the police, administrative authorities and courts often lack the resources, the knowledge or the determination to effectively combat infringements.

China’s own continuing development, and to a lesser extent international pressure, will gradually lead to improvements on the above issues, but this is not a process individual intellectual property (IP) owners can influence. Read the rest of “Protection vs. Enforcement: Where to start your China IPR Strategy? Part I” or post a comment

Having a meaningful footprint in China has become a strategic imperative for multinational companies from around the world. The attraction is China’s seemingly insatiable demand for products, services, capital and technology. George D. Martin, partner and chair of the Faegre & Benson China Practice, sees the current acquisition boom in China as the logical culmination of foreign investment trends that he first observed when practicing in Shanghai in the mid-1990s. Martin expects this M&A trend to continue. But in the years to come, he advises, it won’t be just foreign companies on the buy-side of cross-border M&A deals involving China.

Read the rest of “Dealmaking in China: Getting In on the Action” or post a comment >>

Sourcing to China can be cost effective, but if something goes wrong, it could have a dramatic effect on your bottom line — and negatively impact customer opinion of your business. Can we trust domestic producers and distributors to control quality with fervor equal to their pursuit of low wages? Cheap labor is the easy part; the quality thing is a much tougher nut to crack.

Read the rest of “Is Sourcing in China Safe?” or post a comment >>

By Rebecca A. Morgan

Sourcing to China can be cost effective, but if something goes wrong, it could have a dramatic effect on your bottom line — and negatively impact customer opinion of your business. Can we trust domestic producers and distributors to control quality with fervor equal to their pursuit of low wages? Cheap labor is the easy part; the quality thing is a much tougher nut to crack.A product recall is a very visible and expensive sign of a serious quality problem. The life threatening potential of some problems long ago led American government and producers to develop recall and reverse distribution systems.

For the most part we’ve become good at figuring out which product is at risk, where it went, and executing the recall process with limited harm to life. But lately faith in American product-based businesses has been shaken by the apparent lack of due diligence in assuring low-wage Chinese suppliers meet the same standards as our own. Read the rest of “Is Sourcing in China Safe?” or post a comment