I was talking with one of our China lawyers the other day about how we get the same emails and phone calls from companies with China legal problems that either cannot be solved or cannot be solved at a fee that will make sense. We then discussed how so often these problems could have been
The Supreme People’s Court of China just gave Michael Jordan a partial victory in his long-running trademark battle with Qiaodan Sports. As I wrote last year, Jordan has been trying for years to cancel trademarks he alleges Qiaodan Sports registered in bad faith, including the marks “乔丹” (the Chinese-language version of “Jordan”) and “Qiaodan” (the
The Wall Street Journal wrote how China is increasingly becoming the venue of choice for foreign company patent litigation. That's right. China.
A strange and fascinating story is unfolding in the world of Chinese reality television programming. One of the most popular shows in China, The Voice of China, is embroiled in legal controversy, and the outcome could affect every content license in China. Okay, that might be a bit of hyperbole, but still, this is one
One common mistake U.S. companies make is failing to understand that patents and trademarks are territorial.* That is, these forms of intellectual property provide protection only in the country in which they were registered. If a U.S. company has not registered its patents and trademarks in China, a Chinese company is free to make use
With Amazon and Ebay having increased their efforts at bringing in Chinese sellers and with Chinese manufacturers branching out and making their own products, the number of companies contacting our international intellectual property lawyers about problems with counterfeit products and knockoffs has soared. If the problem involves infringing products being imported into the United States,
My good friend and trademark lawyer extraordinaire, Mike Atkins, recently wrote Basics of Trademark Protection in Plain English on U.S. trademarks. Below I take what Mike said, and explain how it applies to China or not. Mike’s portion is in regular font and my portion is in italics. A. Trademark Enforcement Principles The main way
Above all, protecting your trademark in China requires you register your trademark in China. But if you want to provide additional valuable protection for your trademark, you also should register your China trademark again with Chinese Customs. This additional registration is especially important for those exporting goods from China at risk of counterfeiting. Although there’s
Michael Jordan just lost another China lawsuit in his ongoing effort to combat alleged trademark infringement in China. This lose highlights a point that must be familiar to even the most casual reader of this blog: Michael Jordan just lost another China lawsuit in his ongoing effort to combat alleged trademark infringement. This case, like
Since 2006, we have been writing about fake China law firms. See China Where Even The “Law Firms” Are Fake. In that post we talked about fake Chinese lawyers taking money from American companies for trademark registrations: There are those who take money to file trademarks in China and then simply run away. A new client
