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. 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.
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
Prácticamente todo el mundo tiene propiedad intelectual que requiere protección. Aclaremos primero qué entendemos por «propiedad intelectual». La propiedad intelectual no se limita a las patentes, las marcas registradas, los derechos de autor, etc. Estos son simplemente instrumentos para proteger la propiedad intelectual. Entonces, ¿qué es la propiedad intelectual? Quizá un término más adecuado sería «propiedad intangible» o «activos intangibles». Esto incluye todo lo relacionado con tu negocio que tiene
Recently I had the opportunity to talk with Luis Alemañy, a Puerto Rican entrepreneur whose company, SJT Manufacturing, provides a real-life example of the opportunities present in Puerto Rico for companies looking to bring parts of their supply chains closer to North and/or Latin America. SJT is a contract manufacturer of high-precision sheet metal parts, based
With companies falling all over themselves to move their manufacturing out of China to reduce their risks (and their tariffs), my law firm’s international manufacturing lawyers are not only hearing from many companies wanting to leave China, but from many companies in big trouble for not having properly engineered their leaving China. In The Single
This post focuses on protecting against intellectual property losses arise from what we call leakage — the situation where a company has a contract preventing its foreign counter-party (usually a foreign manufacturer) from using its proprietary information, but fails to prevent that information from leaking to third parties not bound by such a contract. When
This is Part 2 in the series Mitigating China Supply Chain Risk: Should I Stay or Should I Go? by David Alexander* This part gets into the nitty-gritty of what it takes to find new suppliers. We have an American client who has approached us several times over the past 5-7 years with questions or
One of my law firm’s international manufacturing lawyers recently completed a template Tooling [Mold] Ownership Agreement for one of our clients that is having its products manufactured in factories located in multiple countries. This Tooling Ownership Agreement is essentially a template for this one client, and it has yet to be particularized for this one
