Category Archives: ABA Comments

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Webinars, Comments and An Encomium

The Webinars: There several useful webinars that are scheduled for this month.  On July 23, 2020 the USPTO will be hosting a webinar on using overlapping rights to protect your products (10:30 AM-12:30 EST).  China has many efficient and low cost means for protecting design and other rights, including design patents, 3D trademarks,  applied art (copyright), as well as relevant anti-unfair competition law and civil law provisions.  This is an important and useful topic.  On July 28, the World Intellectual Property Review and Wanhuida law firm are co-hosting a webinar on how to deal with bad faith trademark registrations on (4 PM British Summer Time),  a topic that is also dear to my heart.  Both webinars are free.

Berkeley’s China IP series is over for 2020 and we are now planning on 2021.  Recordings of all sessions will be made available to the public in 90 days.  If you have any suggestions on how to further develop this successful program, please write to me.

The Comments: The post-Phase 1/post-pandemic lockdown flurry in China of legislation has elicited comments from the public.  The copyright law comments in China alone elicited  51,165 comments and 167,196 legislative suggestions.  Prof. Andy Sun’s comments on the copyright law are found through this link (Chinese only).  The ABA has also commented to the USPTO on the judicial interpretations recently released for public comment, which may be found through this link.  Please send us any comments that you have prepared!

The Encomium:  July 1 was the 90th birthday of Prof. Jerome A. Cohen.  Jerry’s fans are legion, and I am also grateful for his support of my own efforts in academia.  Here is a recording of the opening webinar we did on April 22, 2020 at Berkeley on developments in Chinese law with Jerry Cohen,  Susan Finder and Sean Randolph.  I join Jerry’s many admirers in wishing him many more years of health, happiness and helping to make the world a better place.  Here is one encomium that was written by Jim McGregor.

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Translation of Draft Patent Law Available

Thanks to He Jing of the Anjie Law Firm, attached please find an unofficial line-by-line translation of the recently released Patent Law Amendments 2nd reading.   Comments are due August 16, 2020.

Some highlights of this draft:

Partial Design Protection

Article 2 adds language back in to allow partial design protection.  This is a welcome development.  Article 42 also maintains the earlier draft’s extension of the duration of the design patent to 15 years.

Patent Abuse

Article 20 clarifies that the abuse of patent rights to exclude or restrict competition constituting a monopoly shall be dealt with under the anti-monopoly law.  The AML is itself under revision.

Good Faith/Public Interest

Article 20 continues to require “good faith” in patent filings and the exercise of patent rights, an important concept borrowed from the Trademark Law revisions which is having an increasing substantive impact.  The limitation that patents shall not be “allowed to harm public interests” raises similar concerns to me to the recently proposed amendments to the Copyright Law, about the definition of “public interest.”

Pharma Issues – Patent Term Restoration and Linkage

The notices of the NPC regarding the draft law, state that pharma-related IP issues were drafted to implement ‘”trade agreement(s).”   These are reflected in proposed Article 42 which provides for patent term restoration.  This draft removes the requirement of the “synchronous” launching of marketing approval outside of China with approval in China in order for patent term restoration to be granted.

Article 75 also sets forth an outline for a patent linkage regime, and calls for the drafting of more detailed measures to further implement the provisions.  Under this proposal, the innovator challenges a generic applicant for marketing approval within 30 days of the announcement of the application.  If the patentee does not file a lawsuit, a generic company may also request a determination from the courts or patent office of non-infringement based upon the China Patent Information Registration Platform for Listed Drugs.  A court or administrative procedure on patent infringement should render its decision within 9 months.  This draft lacks an incentive provision for a generic to successfully challenge an innovator through granting of a first generic marketing exclusivity due to a successful challenge to the patents. This skeletal section is also drafted as an addendum to the statutory exemptions to infringement, which appears to be an awkward placement.

Damages and Liability

Joint liability of Internet service providers for patent infringement has been removed.

Minimum statutory damages of RMB 100,000 has also been removed.  Statutory damages are capped at 5 million RMB.  Quintuple punitive damages up to 5 times remain from the prior draft.   The statutory damage maximum increases to RMB 5 million (Art. 71). In addition to the continuing focus on increases in damages, this draft also continues the momentum for a larger role for patent administrative enforcement.

The extension of the statute of limitations to three years has been retained from the prior draft (Art. 74).

Several provisions address the proposed “open licensing” system (Chapter 6).

The draft also encourages a flexible remuneration system including “equity, options, and dividends” to enable inventors or designers to reasonably share the proceeds of innovation (Art. 16).

Update of August 16, 2020:  The American Bar Association Intellectual Property Law Section and Section of International Law have made their comments on the draft Patent Law Amendments available here.

 

 

 

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New Draft JI on Enforcement on Criminal IP Laws, Especially Trade Secrets

China’s judicial organs (the Supreme People’s Court [“SPC”] and Supreme People’s Procuratorate [“SPP”]) continue to work on trade secret related judicial developments, with the release on June 17, 2020 of the “Interpretation on Several Issues Concerning the Specific Application of Law in Handling Criminal Cases of Infringement of Intellectual Property (3) (Draft for Comment)《关于办理侵犯知识产权刑事案件具体应用法律若干问题的解释（三）（征求意见稿）》.

This JI covers trademark, copyright, and trade secret-related crimes. Comments are due by August 2 2020 at the SPC (Third Civil or IP Division) and SPP. The focus on trade secrets is self-evident from this document.  The Chinese characters for “secret” 机密appear 36 times, trademarks 商标18 times, and a copyrighted “work”著作 8 times.

Among the major provisions that implicate trade secrets are: (a) clarification of how to satisfy criminal thresholds for trade secret enforcement, including use of illegal losses, gains and causing bankruptcy or major operational difficulties (Art. 4); how to calculate losses, including lost profits, lost sales, revenue and other benefits from the misappropriated trade secret (Art. 5); calculating the proportional value of a trade secret in combination with another  product or technology (Art. 6); use of research and development costs if the secret is lost to satisfy criminal thresholds (Art. 7); other compensatory remedial expenses (Art. 8); sanctions for violating protective orders (Art. 9); increases in penalties for entities that are mainly engaged in IP infringement or in the case of “infringement of commercial secrets for foreign institutions, organizations and personnel” (Art. 10, see my earlier blog); a reduction of penalty when the trade secret is disclosed to obtain an IP right, such as a patent, and the right is vested in the trade secret owner (Art. 11); and prohibition against engaging in certain occupations may be imposed for a period of time as a condition of a sentence (Art. 12).

Comment: trade secrets have often proven to be the subject of intense trade pressure.  However, the pressure is often not persistent, and the issues may therefore also receive inconsistent attention over long periods of time.  Recent trade pressure has contributed to such laudable developments as the revised trade secret law (AUCL), the Phase 1 Trade Agreement, the recent increase in legislative and policy work from the courts on trade secrets including work on JI’s and recent plans by SAMR to revise trade secret related rules.

If you are interested in learning more about how inconsistent trade pressure may have prolonged consideration of trade secret issues such as the definition of a “business operator”, limitations of protection to Chinese “citizens”, the availability of preliminary injunctions, and concerns over requiring “practical applicability” for trade secret protection for as long as 25 years, here is a pdf of a presentation that I gave last week at a Berkeley webinar.

July 4 update: Here is a translation of the draft JI.

July 20 update: Here are the comments of the American Bar Association’s Section on Intellectual Property Law and International Law on the six recent JI’s involving IP, including this JI, and others previously blogged about: Judicial Interpretation on Certain Issues Concerning the Application of Law in the Trial of Civil Cases Involving the Misappropriation of Trade Secrets (comments due July 27); Official SPC Reply on the Application of Law in Network-Related Intellectual Property Infringement Disputes (comments due July 27); Guiding Opinions on Hearing Intellectual Property Disputes; Involving E-Commerce Platforms (comments due July 27); Certain Provisions on Evidence in Civil IP Litigation (comments due July 31); Opinions on Increasing Punishment for Intellectual Property Infringement (comments due July 31); Judicial Interpretation Concerning Some Issues on the Specific Application of Law for Handling Criminal Cases of Infringement upon Intellectual Property Rights (comments due August 2).

Updated: June 30, 2020, July 4, 2020, July 20, 2020.