The State Council Refocuses on Intellectual Property Rights: to Reduce the Period of Trademark Registration Review to Five Months

Li Keqiang, Premier of the State Council, chaired the executive meeting of the State Council on July 17. The meeting made it clear that we should speed up the construction of an intelligent system for patent examination and trademark registration, ensure that by the end of the year, we can achieve the goals of pressing the period of high-value patent examination to 17.5 months and the average period of trademark registration to less than 5 months. At the same time, we need to improve intellectual property rights, authorize the quality of registration, and promote the increase of high value and core domain patents.

The meeting pointed out that further strengthening the protection of intellectual property rights is an important part of improving the protection system of intellectual property rights, which is conducive to optimizing the business environment, promoting scientific and technological innovation and deepening international cooperation. Next step:

Firstly, we should continue to strengthen the enforcement of intellectual property law and protect the legitimate rights and interests of all types of market participants without discrimination. We will speed up the formulation and improvement of relevant standards for patent, trademark, copyright infringement, counterfeiting judgment, inspection and identification. Highlighting the focus on strengthening the rectification, deepening the special action against violations of intellectual property rights, severely punishing all kinds of violations of intellectual property rights, and promoting the rapid and coordinated protection of intellectual property rights. International cooperation in intellectual property protection should be strengthened to facilitate enterprises’ overseas rights protection.

Secondly, we should actively promote the process of amending the Patent Law and Copyright Law, promote a new round of comprehensive amendment of the Trademark Law, the implementation rules of the Patent Law and the regulations on the protection of new plant varieties, and substantially increase the cost of illegal activities.

Third, we should continue to improve the quality and efficiency of intellectual property review. We will accelerate the construction of an intelligent system for patent examination and trademark registration to ensure that the objectives are achieved by the end of the year, improve the quality of intellectual property rights authorization and registration, and promote the increase of patents in high value and core areas.

At the same time, the meeting also emphasized that data sharing between government departments and platforms should be strengthened, and a nationwide unified electronic certificate sharing system and a public service platform for electronic invoices should be established this year. Financial institutions are encouraged to provide support for platform economic development. In accordance with the requirements of tolerance and prudence, we should innovate the way of supervision and explore fair supervision methods that are suitable for the characteristics of new formats and beneficial to fair competition, and promote "Internet + regulation". Strengthen credit constraints, scientifically and reasonably define the main responsibility of the platform, and punish network fraud, fake and inferior, unfair competition, leakage and abuse of user information according to law.

August 24, 2019

Source: Xinhua News Agency

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