BIZCHINA> IPR Issue
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BIZCHINA> IPR Issue
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National strategic plan on IPR soon
By Liu Baijia (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-06-07 09:48 Huge amounts of resources are spent ontrademark,copyrightandpatentprotection. More than 30 million fake trademarks were confiscated and 263 people arrested last year alone. On the other hand, almost 1 million applications were submitted for trademarks in the past five years, the highest in the world. The number of innovation patent applications exceeded 210,000, the third largest in the world. The new plan will focus on creation, use, trade, and administration of IPs, instead of only providing them protection. Enterprises will be encouraged to play a leading role in innovation, with incentives like on-site tutorials from IPR professionals, financial aids, easy access to buying or selling of patents, or getting loans with patents as guarantees. "There is usually a tipping point in terms of the incentive for IPR protection," said Zhang Ping, professor of law at Peking University. "When one passes that tipping point, it offers much higher incentives to protect the rights, like Huawei Technology, for instance." Besides the overall strategic change, the focus of protection will be wider and more intense. Regulations against software piracy, once a principal cause of international IPR disputes, has now improved with piracy rates falling by 10 percentage points in the past three years. After government agencies also began buying genuine copies of software, the government told large State-owned enterprises (SOEs) to expedite their process of having only the original stuff. Some of the SOEs are expected to complete the replacement as early as this year. The battle being raged by the Customs against counterfeits is building up, too, as the government is revising a rule on Customs IPR protection and working on a new regulation to increase IPR protection in foreign trade. (For more biz stories, please visit Industries)
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