Ms. Reiko Aoki, General Manager of DLC/GB, visited Beijing East IP in early December 2019.

Zang Baoqing, deputy secretary-general of China Trademark Association, visited Beijing East IP Ltd./Beijing East IP Law Firm with her group members on October 25, 2019 for communication about practical issues of trademark authorization and confirmation.

Thanks very much for the organizers and the host. I am very glad to share my opinions on the topic of “Some Issues on Copyright Protection of Fictional Characters”, that is, a rough framework idea of copyright protection and other aspects of protection of fictional characters. Firstly, I’d like to show you some statistic data. According to the International Licensing Industry Merchandiser’s Association (LIMA), the global retail sales of licensed commodities in 2018 is 280.3 billion US dollars. As can be seen, this is a huge industry, wherein 79% of the sales are through physical stores, and 21% through online stores. Although the proportion of online sells may not be as large as imagined, it will probably change with the development of the models and channels of online retail commodities. Our topic today relates to entertainment and characters, accounting for 43.8% of the 280.3 billion U.S. dollars, namely 122.7 billion U.S. dollars. Therefore, it is already a very large industrial chain to license fictional characters to derivative products for retail. At present, there are no accurate statistics on the Chinese market or statistics on licensing models other than retail commodities, which is believed to be a very large amount.

Appointed Translators: Jason WANG / Austin CHANG, Beijing East IP Law Firm Author: Baoqing ZANG, Trademark Review and Adjudication Board (TRAB) Original Chinese text: China Industry and Commerce Newspaper June 21, 2016

On February 28, the Beijing IP Court (“IP Court”) issued a decision in Qilu Pharmaceutical v. the PRB ((2017)京73行初字No. 5365), which reversed a ruling by the Patent Reexamination Board (“PRB”) that upholds the validity of Patent No. 200910176994.1 (the “’994 patent”) owned by Beijing Sihuan Pharmaceutical (“Sihuan”). The IP Court holds that the inauthentic experimental data presented in the original description result in the failure to satisfy the enablement requirement.

China has three types of patents, i.e., invention, utility model, and design. The utility model patent does not have the counterpart in some other jurisdictions such as the USA, so some essential aspects of the utility model patent will be introduced below for better understanding of it.

On December 20, 2017, in the Patent Reexamination Board of SIPO (PRB) v. Beijing Winsunny Harmony Science & Technology Co., Ltd. ((2016)最高法行再41号), the Supreme Court held that a Markush claim, when drawn to a class of chemical compounds, should be interpreted as a set of Markush elements rather than a set of independent specific compounds. The present case is a petition for retrial filed by the PRB, requesting the Supreme Court to review the second-instance decision made by the Beijing High People’s Court (“High Court”). In reversing the PRB’s decision in the invalidation proceedings instituted by Beijing Winsunny Harmony Science & Technology Co., Ltd. (“Winsunny”), the High Court recognized a Markush claim as claiming a set of parallel technical solutions.