Years ago, Chinese companies had to pay 41 US dollars as the patent license fee when exporting 1 color TV to the US, which dominated the main profit of the export. "We must change the heavy burden like this." Said Tian Weiping, Executive Vice General Manager of China Color TV Union Technology Co., LTD. (CTU). Actually, Tian sowed a seed of dream deep in his heart: to advance Chinese entrepreneurs' step of going abroad through the patent operation.
In March 2007, ten Chinese color TV companies including TCL, CHANGHONG and KONKA, jointly founded CTU, marking the start of the patent pool of Chinese color TV. As one of the leaders of the company, Tian started his dream. "We organized and promoted the patent license negotiations, fought for a reasonable price. And around the joint innovation, we promoted the construction of the patent pool and made full use of our own patents independently. "Tian Weiping said.
In 2010, CTU signed new patent license agreement with Thomson Co., changing the payment of patent license fee into annual fee pattern and reducing the fee. At the same time, CTU organized experts to retrieval and analysis the related patents in foreign countries, and found some patents were expired or the ownership was not clear, timely put forward the request for invalidation of patent right to the relevant authorities and achieved success. In recent four years, CTU successfully saved nearly 3 billion RMB Yuan of color TV patent license fee.
In recent years, CTU set up its own color TV patent information database and built Chinese color TV patent information service warning public platform while operating the patent pool. The patent information database included over 10,000 global patents on color TV. Through the database, China's color TV enterprises can realize fast retrieval, playing an important role in infringement prevention, patent licensing negotiations and overseas market exploration. "Hope Chinese enterprises could go faster and better on the way of going abroad under our efforts." Tian said.
(Source: China IP News)
