PTO Documents Surge in ‘Suspect’ Chinese IP Applications
Patents and trademarks motivated by “non-market factors,” such as subsidies, government mandates, “bad-faith” applications and “defensive countermeasures," can “undermine the reliability” of intellectual property “registries,” reported the Patent and Trademark Office Wednesday. The growing number of “suspect” applications filed in…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
the U.S. from China prompted the agency to “study the reasons for this development.” Though PTO knows of no “public source information” showing what proportion of IP applications in China are motivated by subsidies, “it has observed the impact of Chinese subsidies granted for foreign trademark applications.” After Shenzhen and other cities began offering subsidies for overseas trademark applications, PTO experienced a “surge” in fraudulent applications originating in China, it said. Irregularities can abound, including narrowing the scope of “protections” available to IP owners “engaged in the legitimate sale of goods and services,” it said. “Absent consideration of the role of non-market factors, cross-border comparisons based on the raw number of trademark and patent applications risk overstating brand creation and innovation activity in China.” PTO offered no recommended remedies.