A dialogue with Lv Guoqiang, Director of Shanghai Intellectual Property Administration

During the 2010 Shanghai Expo, the State Intellectual Property Office led the National Copyright Administration of the PRC and other six units to form a special inspection team to research IPR protection during the Expo. The squad arrived in Shanghai to investigate IPR protection at the Expo Campus, and subsequently held a forum. Wu Xiaoming, team leader of the inspection team, deputy director of protection coordination department of the State Intellectual Property Office, confirmed the efforts made by Shanghai in IPR protection during the Expo, after hearing the situation of IPR protection at the Expo.

What Score Does the Expo 2010 Shanghai Achieve?

In the early stages of the Expo, certain people involved worried about IP issues during the enormous event; they thought that IPR protection at the Shanghai Expo was more complex than that of the Beijing Olympics. The reasons were: IPR protection for the Beijing Olympics mainly involved the logo protection of the organizer, while the Shanghai Expo needed to protect the intellectual results of the exhibitors, and third-party IP as well, which involved various protecting bodies such as countries, international organizations, cities and enterprises; the duration of the Beijing Olympics lasted only half a month, so “special” measure were adopted, while the time span of the Shanghai Expo reached six months, which made the long-term “unusual” job of rights protection impossible.

In this research, Wu Xiaoming highly praised the IPR protection of Shanghai: Through strengthening the efforts to crack down on IP infringement, strengthening market supervision, strengthening promotion, the IPR protection environment of the Shanghai Expo proved to be substantial. IPR protection at the Shanghai Expo achieved huge success, which was embodied in the macro-deployment. It was strengthened with effective measures; solid and comprehensive law enforcement with remarkable results; a smooth and convenient IPR protection channel for the exhibitors; and a good public opinion atmosphere on the issue of IPR protection.

A Dialogue with Lv Guoqiang

After the successful application of the Shanghai Expo, China made a promise to the world, namely the IPR Protection Outline of Expo 2010 Shanghai, which put forward ten measures concerning IPR protection of the Shanghai Expo. Lv Guoqiang has stated that the job they did made good on the promise.

How was the promise made good on, and what achievements and shortcomings were there? The reporter had a dialogue with Lv Guoqiang to interpret the transcript of the Shanghai Expo.

China IP: It is understood that a special IP service center was set up during the Expo, what job was the center responsible for? Are there any other IP related service organizations besides it?

Lv Guoqiang: Exhibitors IP Service Center of the Shanghai Expo officially began to run on April 15, 2010. The center was led by the Bureau of Shanghai World Expo, IP volunteers participated from the universities in Shanghai and coordinated by each member unit of the joint conference. The center was in charge of uniformly giving advice for IP related issues upon the requests of the exhibitors, providing guidance of IP related issues to the exhibitors, coordinating and solving the IP disputes among the exhibitors.

In addition, in order to uniformly receive the complaints and reports of IP infringement from various exhibitors, Shanghai IP Joint Conference drew support from the national IP rights protection hotline 12330 to set the complaint and report service hotline for the exhibitors.