Our international manufacturing lawyers are always being asked how to structure product development relationships with Chinese companies so the foreign buyer company actually ends up with the rights to the product that gets developed. This post addresses that issue. The key is to focus on manufacturing rights, rather than on intellectual property rights, especially when
1. Sorry, But Overseas Factory Problems are Likely YOUR Fault The genesis for this post is an excellent post written by Renaud Anjoran and a series of Linkedin comments on that post. The post is on Renaud’s Quality Inspection Blog and it’s called 28 Common Problems Chinese Suppliers Cause Importers. Renaud is the long-term owner of
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
1. Selling Your Products on Chinese E-Commerce Sites With China accounting for half of the e-commerce transactions in the world, non-Chinese companies are enjoying some of the spoils. According to Alibaba, U.S. companies sold $5.4 billion in goods on its sites during the recent Singles’ Day shopathon. This success is partly due to Alibaba’s own
1. The Product Development Stage is the Riskiest Stage of Manufacturing Companies doing overseas contract manufacturing often “co-develop” products with their overseas manufacturers. In some cases, the company seeking a manufacturer has completed product development and the only involvement from the manufacturer will be to figure out how to manufacture the product at high volumes.
George Santayana once said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”? Although the line was not about Chinese trademark law, it might as well have been. We have been beating the drum for years about registering trademarks in China (see here and here for a representative sample), but every time I start
Going through old emails and found an email from one of our international manufacturing lawyers to a client that needed help drafting up a term sheet for one of its suppliers that had agreed to grant it an exclusive on various products. I have modified the email slightly to remove any potential identifiers and I
Our China IP team regularly oversees requests to Chinese websites to take down counterfeit products. The success rate on getting these products removed within a week or so is North of 99%. The following email (modified very slightly) crossed my computer the other day. It is from one of our China IP lawyers who does
