The Ministry of Justice had published a draft of the Foreign Investment Law Implementing Regulations for public comment.  Chinalawtranslate has prepared an English translation of the proposed regulations and of the law itself.   The due date for submitting comments is December 1.  The US-China Business Council has graciously already made its comments available in English and Chinese to the public.  The Foreign Investment Law was one of several laws enacted earlier in 2019 that appear to be responsive to US concerns and pressure.

The primary provisions addressing IP are Articles 24 and 25, which state:

Article 24: The state is to establish a punitive compensation system for violations of intellectual property rights, promote the establishment of rapid collaborative protection mechanisms for intellectual property rights, complete diversified dispute resolution mechanisms for intellectual property rights disputes and mechanisms for assistance in protecting intellectual property rights, to increase the force of protections for foreign investors’ and foreign-invested enterprises’ intellectual property rights.

The intellectual property rights of foreign investors and foreign-invested enterprises shall be equally protected in the drafting of standards in accordance with law, and where foreign investors’ or foreign-invested enterprises’ patents are involved, it shall be handled in accordance with the relevant management provisions of state standards involving patents.

Article 25: Administrative organs and their staffs must not use the performance of administrative management duties such as handling registration, approvals or filings for investment projects, and administrative permits, as well as implementing oversight inspections, administrative punishments, or administrative compulsion, to compel or covertly compel foreign investors or foreign-invested enterprises to transfer technology.

(chinalawtranslate translation).

The language in the first paragraph of Article 24 appears to track trade war pressures, including demands for punitive compensation.   As I have argued repeatedly, a better focus might be on deterrent civil damages, and/or the basic structure set forth in the WTO of having adequate and effective civil remedies with criminal remedies as an adjunct for willful, commercial-scale harm.  In this scheme, there is little place for administrative remedies, as was noted in DS362 (the IP enforcement case at the WTO).  The WTO panel, in that case, noted that “neither party [the US nor China] to the dispute argues that administrative enforcement may fulfil the obligations on criminal procedures and remedies set out in Article 61 of the TRIPS Agreement. Therefore, the Panel does not consider this issue.”  There have also been numerous academic studies on the challenges of creating a sui generis administrative IP enforcement system in China.  The language in Article 24 is also highly repetitive of the November 21, 2018 special Memorandum of Understanding/campaign mechanisms involving 38 government agencies to address six types of faithless IP conduct, about which I previously blogged.

What is notably absent from these commitments is an obligation to increase transparency, which is especially concerning due to an apparent slowdown in the publication of foreign IP-related court cases since the trade war began.   I will be blogging more about this soon, but here is what the decline in published US cases looks like based on IPHouse data, with a flatlining since January 1, 2018:

See also my slides from the recent Berkeley transnational IP litigation conference available here.

The language regarding standards in the second paragraph repeats long-standing concerns about foreigners being excluded from standards-setting processes, as was addressed in the 2015 JCCT.  It does not set forth commitments about fairness or equal treatment which have been raised before in industrial policy drafting (as was addressed in the 26th JCCT on semiconductor policy), antitrust investigations, patent prosecution or litigation (for which there is a wealth of empirical data).

Article 25 also appears trade responsive.  It would be useful at this time to determine the current magnitude of forced technology transfer in foreign direct investment, and to determine how it subsists and whether it has measurably decreased since the trade war began, including whether legitimate licensing transactions have stepped in to provide increased revenue for technology licensors as a result of these and other reforms, including revision of the Administration of Technology Import/Export Regulations.