Yesterday, in China Copyright Law: It Pays to Register, I talked about how copyrights are an essential part of any IP protection plan. But when you’re trying to enforce your rights, how do you prove what you have registered? A copyright registration certificate merely identifies a creative work by its name and the type of work.
If you truly want to protect your content in China, register your copyright in China
No two China trademark strategies are the same, but one thing is pretty much a constant: You should register the company’s original English name. Before we go on, a clarification: I use “English name” as shorthand, but these names are often in other languages, or simply be a random collection of Latin letters. Names in
Trademark protection is a critical task for companies manufacturing and distributing products overseas. While many large multinationals have armies of lawyers policing their intellectual property rights (IPR), small- and medium-sized businesses that are expanding overseas often need help figuring out the best and most cost-effective way to protect their trademarks, patents and copyrights. What perhaps
Hardly a week goes by without a company contacting one of our international IP lawyers wanting to retain us to “stop the counterfeits” of their products online and offline. Far too often these people believe one of our IP lawyers can within 24 hours send out a “template” cease and desist letter and within another 24
Whenever clients ask about filing a trademark in China via the Madrid System, my answer is simple: filing a national application directly with China’s own Trademark Office is better. The one-size-fits-all Madrid process makes registering a trademark in China seem easy. Really easy: all you have to do is check a box marked “China.” However, while Madrid applications are
Once or twice a month, my law firm’s international trademark lawyers have been contacted by companies whose China trademark registrations were botched by an online trademark service. In all instances, the trademark registration problems stemmed from online trademark services that purport to be able to register trademarks pretty much anywhere in the world, including China.
It is possible to remove a product from Alibaba that violates your unregistered copyright.
A client of ours sent me a 2015 article by Case Engelen (a leading international electronic designer) the other day, entitled Kickstarter Prototype to Production: $100K is not Enough, and asked whether I agreed with it. I most certainly do. The article provides a list of compelling reasons why getting an electronics product manufactured in
