Legislator urges authorities to enforce trademark laws

This article was written by Bowun Jhu and published by the Taiwan Journal on February 10, 2006. It reports that in recent years a lot of China-based business interests have registered the trademarks of many well-known Taiwanese agricultural products. This is a serious problem of infringement upon the rights and interests of Taiwanese producers.

According to Legislator Lin Yun-sheng, these China-based business interests have also registered Taiwanese place names as trademarks. These places are closely associated with products grown or produced in Taiwan, such as Gukeng's coffee, Chihshang's rice, Puli's wine, Hsinchu's rice noodles, Hsilo's soy sauce, Tungkang's seafood and Tungting's tea. The result of their being registered by China-based business interests is that Taiwanese producers are experiencing great difficulty selling these products in China.

Lin argues that disputes about trademarks and patent rights between Taiwan and China should be resolved within the World Trade Organization framework. However, Chinese authorities have continuously refused to talk with their Taiwanese counterparts in international forums.

Taiwan and China have not been discussing issues about protection of intellectual property rights since 1995. Various government and industrial agencies, such as the Council of Agriculture, the Mainland Affairs Council, the Ministry of Economic Affairs and associations of farmers and food processors, decided recently that Taiwan's Strait Exchange Foundation should negotiate with China's Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait and try to invalidate the trademarks in question. Otherwise, the issue will have to be resolved by lawsuits and other actions within the World Trade Organization.

Government statistics show that between 1989 and 2004, Taiwanese applied for 90,114 trademarks in China. Between 1993 and 2005, Chinese filed 2,591 applications in Taiwan. The growing number of applications is paralleled by a mounting tide of infringement disputes, for which there exist no formal channels for negotiation and resolution. This is a problem that demands urgent attention.