Posts Tagged: "sipo"

On the morning of Thursday, July 19th, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held a hearing titled China’s Threat to American Government and Private Sector Research and Innovation Leadership. The day’s hearing was dedicated to discuss strategies, both legal and illicit, which are employed by the Chinese government and designed to gain a competitive advantage over the United States.

The patent boom China has been experiencing is easy to explain. China as a country has been unwavering in its support for domestic patent production in recent years. Indeed, the Chinese government has been actively encouraging not only increased innovation that makes it more likely there will be patentable innovations, but that government has been aggressively incentivizing increased patent filings. Incentives include subsidizing patent filing fees, providing rewards for patent filings, and tax credits that are tied to patent output. In many ways, China’s innovation economy is a near photo-negative of the current iteration of the U.S. patent system.

Among the many bureaucratic changes that resulted from the amendments to the Chinese Constitution included the integration of trademark responsibilities with the other intellectual property activities of the State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO). Such responsibilities, including the management of trademark applications, grants and administrative adjudications, were formerly the province of China’s State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC), which has been disbanded. The newly reorganized SIPO will also handle applications and grants for geographical indications of product origin.

One of the questions that gets asked this time of year, when the world is busy flipping the calendar from one year to the next, is “What are you looking forward to in the new year?” For patent owners operating in the U.S., however, it may be better to ask, “What are you looking ahead to in 2018?” Looking forward would seem to denote a sense of optimism and such optimism has been in short supply among those in the tech space who don’t have the deep wallets to withstand the costs of pursuing infringers, including those costs incurred by the efficient infringer cartel’s use of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB).

As we mark the close of yet another year, we’re provided with a perfect opportunity to look back on the previous twelve months and see what has transpired. No one could call it a good year for patent owners (except those with the largest pockets, of course) starting with the United States’ 10th-place ranking among national patent systems in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s IP Index, and it didn’t appear as though any weaknesses in uncertain patentability across the U.S. technological landscape were addressed in a positive manner this year. It’s inevitable that the ball will drop on New Year’s Eve and calendars everywhere will turn from 2017 to 2018. Whether the U.S. federal government will be able to stop the death knell sounding doom for our nation’s patent system, however, is still anyone’s guess and it seems far from likely.

“Increasing numbers of US operating companies dislike patent protection,” Ding explained to IAM. “[T]he production and manufacture of products are increasingly located in Asia and Asian companies have more and more patents… opportunities are being transferred to the East just like manufacturing was.” * * * Although strong patent licensing activities are surely welcome news to Huawei and the many people employed by that firm, stakeholders in the U.S. patent system likely can’t help but see this as a further harbinger that China’s innovation economy will overtake ours in the coming years.

If you are an in-house counsel at a U.S. technology company, managing its global patent portfolio with a potentially significant exposure in China, you face some special challenges trying to effectively and efficiently manage the Chinese patent prosecution through your Chinese IP firms. You might assume that these challenges would be caused by some undefinable “Chinese” element. You already knew how to manage U.S. prosecution, performed by the outside U.S. law firms, and in theory you can apply that learned expertise to managing the process in China. But this is not U.S.-style patent prosecution in another place. The working language will be Chinese in addition to English, the communications will generally be over long distances, 12 to 15 time zones away, and you will have to deal with significant differences in laws, practices, and cultures. This article provides a roadmap and tips for making this process productive and successful.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has published its annual World Intellectual Property Indicators. The 2016 report dissects the macro trends associated with filing activity and registrations for 2015 in the following intellectual property areas: patents, trademarks, industrial designs, and plant varieties… The twenty-year era of growth in industrial design patent applications came to an abrupt end in 2014, with a substantial drop in applications filed by 10.2%. In 2015, these figures are back on the rise, with a 2.3% increase. The number of designs in applications also rose in 2015, with non-resident applicant designs being the primary catalyst for growth. China was the main contributor to the number of designs per application, providing half the global total.

On July 28th, 2017, China’s State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) announced a new set of regulations which are intended to streamline the examination of patent applications in certain burgeoning fields of technology. The new policy, which comes in response to “the central government’s call for an improved business environment, streamlined procedures for administrative approval, and the booming market,” will allow for the examination of both utility model and industrial design patent applications; SIPO guidelines issued as recently as five years ago only covered a single patent application designation, invention patents.

Given the broad range of countries deploying UAVs and the large number of applications for UAVs, we took a look at patent data from the last 20 years (1997 to 2016) to determine whether any trends in UAV development could be identified. Our findings show some surprising results with regard to development and patenting of drone technology. In this analysis we focuses on the top-5 patent offices for obtaining UAV related patents, the State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) in China, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the European Patent Office (EPO), the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) in South Korea, and the Japan Patent Office (JPO).

Guidelines, set to go into effect on April 1st in China, continue to leave the window open for software and business method patents. For software patents, patent applicants will be able to claim a medium plus computer program process instead of claiming means plus function, a term which has typically been narrowly construed by SIPO examiners. As ZY Partners’ analysis notes, previously ineligible claims directed at “a computer program product” or “a machine-readable medium” will now be eligible for patent protection in China…. Given this trend towards delegitimizing the patentability of inventions within valuable growth sectors in the U.S., it’s particularly galling to see that China, often portrayed as the United States’ top economic competitor, has been moving in the opposite direction, even if only slightly. Last October, China’s State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) released revised guidelines for its patent examiners and some were quick to note that the revised guidelines were friendlier to both software and business method patents.

Of the 2.9 million patent applications which were filed in patent offices across the world in 2015, more than one million of those applications were filed with the State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) of China, the first time that a single patent office has broken that milestone according to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). China’s huge number of filings is a big reason why worldwide patent applications rose 7.8 percent from 2014’s totals. WIPO also notes that China received more patent applications than its next three rivals combined: the United States (589,410 patent applications); Japan (318,721); and the Republic of Korea (213,694).

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has published its annual World Intellectual Property Indicators. The 2015 report dissects the macro trends associated with filing activity and registrations for 2014 in the following intellectual property areas: patents, trademarks, industrial designs, and plant varieties… The twenty-year era of growth in industrial design patent applications came to an abrupt end in 2014… The decline in global applications stems primarily from the pronounced decrease in resident filings at the State Intellectual Property Office of the People’s Republic of China (SIPO), which fell 14.9% over the past year.

The IP5 is the name given to a forum of the five largest intellectual property offices in the world that was set-up to improve the efficiency of the examination process for patents worldwide. The top five Patent Offices (IP5) have recognized this internationalization phenomenon and many directives have been introduced to facilitate cooperation between the patent offices… For example, the IP5’s Common Citation Document (CCD) application now allows access of up-to-date citation data of all five patent offices.