Thomson Reuters CompuMark, a Thomson Reuters Intellectual Property & Science business and global leader in trademark searching and brand protection solutions, has released a whitepaper outlining best practices for companies to file and protect trademarks in China. The new paper, 'Best Practices for Brand Expansion in China: How to Navigate a Unique Intellectual Property Landscape,' identifies specific strategies companies can implement to protect their brands in one of the most challenging intellectual property environments in the world.
With over 1.3 billion consumers, China claims to be the world's largest target market for global brand owners. However, multinational firms are quickly learning that in order to seize rampant growth opportunity in China, they must deal with the country's complex intellectual property landscape. Early leaders in the region have established a clear set of best practices for trademark filing and maintenance that greatly improves the odds of success against counterfeiters and trademark squatters.
According to the paper, between 2006 and 2012 over 5 million trademarks were published in China, a 76 percent increase in a six-year period. In 2012, China published 924,414 trademarks, the most of any nation in the world. File Early: China's first-to-file system for trademark registration, combined with the trademark office's new push to speed-up processing times, makes it essential for brand owners to file a mark well in advance of a Chinese brand introduction. Due to China's unique single-class filing system, companies need to protect their brands across all sectors, not just those in which they are active. This limits the potential for trademark squatting of brands associated with non-traditional products. Further, the paper notes that the best way to fight counterfeiting is to implement a systematic approach to identifying the source of the problem. The time spent pursuing the leaders of counterfeiting practices will vastly outweigh the cost of systematically going after each individual infringer.
Thomson Reuters CompuMark, with more than 40 years of trademark search, clearance and watch experience, protects nearly all of the world's top brands and is used by leading trademark law firms around the globe.
