When someone emails one of our international manufacturing lawyers asking us what they should be considering to protect themselves when manufacturing overseas, we typically respond with something like the following: Our clients that manufacture product in China/Vietnam/Mexico/India/Thailand/Taiwan/Malysia (or wherever it is they are asking about) typically use us for some or all of the following
Trademarks are not limited to words or drawings and can include sensory marks such as colors, smells and sounds. In the US, the USPTO recognizes sounds as trademarks if the sounds make you think of a company’s product or service. MGM’s roaring lion, Homer Simpson’s D’OH, and 20th Century Fox’s fanfare are all famous sounds
Many American companies (at least outside California where employee non-competes are generally considered invalid) love non-competes and they use them as a matter of course with most (sometimes all) their employees. Generally, a non-compete agreement or a non-compete provision in an employee contract provides that the employee cannot work for one of the employer's competitors
Most China watchers have spent the past three months trying to decide what a Biden Presidency means for U.S.-China relations. And over the past week, some China watchers also have been watching as mainland Chinese users flocked to discussions on the Clubhouse app, seemingly without sparking concern among Great Firewall monitors. That brief window into
Operating overseas is always difficult. Companies that start out in a new country rarely know the culture or the laws or the rules or the people that can be the deciders between success and failure. It is of course possible to bring in good people who know all of these things, but that can be
Got an email from an American client this morning asking me whether I was aware of how American companies that do "significant" business with China cannot receive Paycheck Protection Program (PPP2) loans. I replied that I was not, because my focus is not on domestic U.S. law or business. But then I started thinking more
1. LaoWhy86 on YouTube Spent the last few days catching up on my China reading and viewing, mostly those articles and videos friends, clients and readers wrote me insisting I read. One of the sites I checked out -- at the recommendation of many people -- is LaoWhy86 on YouTube. I'm hooked LaoWhy86 is an
As many readers of this blog already know, words in Latin script (including, of course, English words) can be registered in China as trademarks. But can you register Chinese character trademarks in the United States or the EU? This is an important question for Chinese brands, of course, but also for US and EU brands
1. Chinese Manufacturers Will Copy and Sell Your Products; It’s What They Do Literally every single day this past week, the international IP lawyers at my law firm received at least one email from an American/European/Australasian company on how their Chinese manufacturer was selling their products at wholesale and/or at retail to others. These emails
If you are going to manufacture your products in Asia, you need to register your brand name and your logo as a trademark in whatever Asian country you are doing your manufacturing. And as we have been saying for years and years, there are no ifs ands or buts about this. But in addition to the
