China’s National Intellectual Property Administration: Crackdown on 482,000 malicious registered trademarks in 2021, Rejection of 12,200 Trademark for Malicious Hoarding

The State Council Information Office held a press conference  on April 24, 2022, inviting Shen Changyu, director of the State Intellectual Property Office, He Zhimin, deputy director of the State Intellectual Property Office, and Wang Zhicheng, director of the Copyright Administration to discuss the development of intellectual property rights in 2021. Some highlights from the press conference include:

• crackdown on 482,000 maliciously registered trademarks in the trademark examination process, of which
  • 60,400 maliciously hoarded trademarks were voluntarily rejected, and
  • 1,628 maliciously registered trademarks that harmed social and public interests were rejected.
• In the trademark opposition review process:
  • a total of 30,000 malicious registered trademarks have been cracked down on.
  • 1,729 trademarks were declared invalid ex officio, and
  • the number of trademarks invalidated ex officio was five times the total in the past 10 years.

On the patent side, Shen Changyu, Director of the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) stated,

A total of 696,000 invention patents were authorized throughout the year [2021], and the number of high-value invention patents per 10,000 population reached 7.5, an increase of 1.2 over the previous year. The number of international patent applications submitted by Chinese applicants through the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) reached 69,500, ranking first in the world for the third consecutive year.

…

Completely cancel the subsidies and rewards for patent and trademark applications, and severely crack down on abnormal patent applications and malicious trademark registrations. 

Other data points of interest:

• A total of 79,200 batches of suspected infringing goods have been detained for import and export.
• China accepted 635,000 intellectual property rights cases of first instance,S second instance, and retrial of various types, and concluded 595,000 cases.
• China approved the arrest of more than 7,800 people in more than 4,500 criminal cases involving intellectual property infringement.
• 21,000 cases of counterfeiting crimes were investigated, 38,000 criminal suspects were arrested, and the total value of the cases involved was 9.53 billion RMB.
• The import and export volume of intellectual property royalties increased from 226.51 billion RMB in 2017 to 378.30 billion yuan, of which the average annual growth rate of exports was 23.8%, which was 2.03 times the growth rate of imports.

A full transcript from the State Council Information Office is available here (Chinese only).

 

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