It has been two challenging years, yet there are many reasons to still have hope. We wish you a blessed Lunar New Year as we welcome the year of the Tiger. We wanted to highlight a few new developments in China. China has joined the Hague System for the International Registration of Industrial Designs, submitting its instrument of accession to the 1999 Geneva Act of the Hague Agreement on February 5, 2022. The Act will go into effect in China on May 5, 2022. The Hague System provides a way for designers to file a single international design application to register up to 100 designs in up to 94 countries.…
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CHINA DIVISIONAL PATENT STRATEGY: Recent Judgment Narrows What Constitutes “Different Inventions” for Divisionals
In China, patents applicants take advantage of a commonly-used divisional filing strategy to achieve a fine-tuned balance between protection scope and protection period (if used properly). Patent applicants (especially foreign applicants) widely welcome this well-established strategy, and up until now, have used it with much success. In fact, we recommend this strategy and have even written about this China divisional patent strategy. However, a recent judgment decision has called this strategy into question. We share more about this interesting case below. Case Background A company in Zhejiang Province (JC Company) filed a divisional application with claims having a different scope of protection from its utility model “parent” (which was about…
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CHINA: How Prohibiting “Illegal” Inventions Runs into Food Safety Law
Chinese Patent Law has an interesting provision that specifically prohibits patent protection on “illegal” or “immoral” inventions. What does this mean, exactly? According to Article 5.1 of the Chinese Patent Law, “no patent shall be granted for an invention that contravenes any law or social moral or that is detrimental to public interests.” On its face, this provision seems extremely broad, undefined, and potentially very subjective. Whose moral standard? And how do you define “detrimental”? Because details of litigations are not always publicly available in China, we only have limited examples by which we can understand how Chinese courts and examiners interpret and apply this language. Below we highlight one…
