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Lulin Gao

is the Founder and Chairman of Beijing East IP, and one of the founders of the modern China intellectual property legal system. He earned his Ph.D. from the Institute of Geological Prospecting in Moscow. He worked the State Planning Commission for years. From 1987 to 1998, Dr. Gao worked as Commissioner of the Chinese Patent Office. In 1998, he was responsible for the establishment of the State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) and served as its first commissioner. From 1998 to 2000, he was appointed a senior advisor to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva. He currently serves as the Honorary President of the All-China Patent Agents Association, the Advisor of the International Intellectual Property Institute (IIPI), the Vice Chairman of the China Internet Society, the Senior Counsel of the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), an arbitrator with the Asian Domain Name Dispute Resolution Center (ADNDRC) and the Domain Name Dispute of the China International Economic and Trade Arbitration Commission (CIETAC). Dr. Gao has also been an Adjunct Professor at Tsinghua University School of Law and the John Marshall School of Law.

Recent Articles by Lulin Gao

The Long-Awaited Fourth Amendment to the Chinese Patent Law: An In-Depth Look

On October 17, 2020, the Standing Committee of the Thirteenth National People’s Congress (China’s top legislature) passed the Fourth Amendment to the Chinese Patent Law, which will become effective on June 1, 2021 (“Effective Date”). As I was digesting the news and browsing through the 29 newly published changes made to the previous version of the Chinese Patent Law, which was passed in 2008, a line from “The Song of the Pipa Player”, a popular poem written in 816 A.D. by Bai Juyi (one of the three most famous poets in China’s Tang Dynasty), came to mind: “Only after our repeated calls did she appear; her face half hidden behind the pipa she held.” Indeed, while the First, Second, and Third Amendment to the 1984 Chinese Patent Law each came out with clockwork precision eight years after the previous enactment—in 1992, 2000, and 2008, respectively—this Fourth Amendment took 12 years to incubate, and struck a number of new areas that will need to be further revealed in future practice.

A Comparative Look at Patent Subject Matter Eligibility Standards: China Versus the United States

Much has happened to the patent subject matter eligibility standard in the U.S. since Mayo. On April 27, 2020, Judge Paul Michel and John Battaglia published an excellent article on IPWatchdog analyzing the U.S. Section 101 patent subject matter eligibility jurisprudence. In that article, Judge Michel and Battaglia reminded judges and practitioners to reference “the more-favorable foreign patent laws on the patent eligibility for diagnostic testing, business methods and software … in countries such as England, China, or the European Union … to inform such a judicially created ineligibility standard, as opposed to the U.S. Constitution or a federal statute.”  Here, we take a quick comparative look at the current patent subject matter eligibility standard in China.