China employees have many rights they cannot contract away. China employee working hours is a good example of this. As I have written previously, most China employees can only work under China’s “standard working hours system,” and in most places in China, that means a 40-hour work week — 8 hours a day and 5
Pretty much every month, one of my law firm’s international lawyers gets an email or a phone call from someone (often a fellow lawyer) seeking assistance with making a China related document legal for some sort of use somewhere in the world. Maybe 40 percent of the time, the request relates to a need to
“work made for hire” The basis for the “work made for hire” (often shortened to “work for hire”) doctrine is clear: employers should own (some) rights to work created by their employees, whether such work is protectable by copyright, patent, or some other IP right. “invention for hire” doctrine in China But legally, it’s as
American and European companies constantly come to my law firm’s China lawyers seeking to “shore up” their China IP protections. These are mostly companies that have been doing business in or with China for months or years and have now decided they are doing well enough in China to start paying to protect what they
Indemnification is “to make compensation for incurred hurt, loss, or damage” and our clients often request indemnity to protect against a product that injures people or infringes on some third party’s intellectual property right. Seeking such indemnification makes complete sense because the last thing you want when you buy a product from overseas is to
Multi-level companies want to go into China. But as the following portion from a memorandum from one of our China compliance lawyers shows, multi-level marketing in any form is prohibited in China per the Regulations for the Prohibition of Pyramid Selling (2005). Article 7 of the Pyramid Selling regulations prohibits the following: Payment to promoters
I recently spoke in Beijing at a conference on legal protection of sports broadcasts, organized by the National Copyright Administration of China (NCAC) and the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Other speakers included Chinese judges, Chinese and American lawyers and academics, sports league and broadcaster general counsel, and American and European IP officials. What
Most Americans do not understand court corruption. Otherwise they would not so frequently say there is no point in bringing a lawsuit in such and such a court because it’s corrupt. Corruption influences (sometimes greatly) court cases, but neither as often nor as much as widely believed. When dealing with court corruption, one has to
Because labor remuneration is an often-litigated issue in China, employers should be careful when reducing employee salaries and they should take that action only when prepared to defend it before an arbitrator or a judge. As with China-based employee terminations, the best way to proceed and avoid employment disputes will usually via a mutual agreement
Spring is coming to an end, but it’s not too late to conduct a little spring cleaning. First on the list: get your IP in order and register your trademarks in China. The following are 8 reasons to do so. 1. Because you are having branded goods manufactured in China, and you don’t want them
