Major acts in recent days (08-01-02)

Biological pirates


China remains vulnerable to bio-pirates who could plunder the genetic material of plants and animals, a senior environment official says.

Wu Xiaoqing, deputy head of the State Environmental Protection Administration, said foreign companies might patent resources and sell them on the Chinese and world markets.

One example is the genes of China's wild soybeans. Of the 20,140 different plants the United States is thought to have imported from China by June 30, 2002, 4,452 were soybeans. Of those, 168 were wild soybeans.

Yet an independent agricultural analyst said that only 2,177 plants were approved for exports by Chinese authorities and wild soybeans were not even on the list.

Fostering IP environment

During the recent 2007 China Intellectual Property Culture Forum in Beijing, Vice-Commissioner of the State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) Lin Binghui said a favorable cultural environment must be fostered to develop intellectual properties (IP) as party of the effort to build an innovative country.

Lin said a national IP strategy will be promulgated and implemented next year, illustrating that China's IP work has entered a new stage of development.

He added that the proper culture for developing an IP system and its mechanisms is needed because China's IP history is short and awareness and concepts are lacking.

Soaring trademarks

Trademark applications totaled more than 3 million at the end of November in China, a year-on-year increase of 29.19 percent, including 197 well-known trademarks that were approved, according to a working conference on the management of industry and commerce held recently in Beijing.

Departments in industry and commerce at various levels attach importance to improving and standardizing the market by strengthening supervision and law enforcement. They also began campaigns to protect the interests of both consumers and industry.

While streamlining the trademark examination process, the departments also began advance review and restricted registrations that it said helped curb unethical applications, opposition filings and transfers.

Clampdown on pesticide names

China's Ministry of Agriculture (MOA) said it will no longer approve commercial brand names for pesticides from January 8 and that all pesticides must be traded under generic names as of July 1.

Wang Shoucong, a senior official with the MOA, said commercial pesticide brands will be reduced from the current 16,000 to 1,700.

Pesticides can currently be traded under generic names, commercial brands or trademarked names, so some manufacturers use different names for the same pesticide to make higher profits. One of the chemicals, imidacloprid, is traded under more than 700 different names.

Wang said because pesticide regulations did not have restrictions on commercial names, some manufacturers vigorously promoted brand-named pesticides while minimizing their actual chemical names on packaging.

Sewing up cooperation


To strengthen ties between China and Japan in IPR work in sewing machines, working groups from industry associations held a colloquium in Shanghai recently.

"Both China and Japan are major contributors to the development of the world's sewing machine industry, and all countries around the world should bear the responsibilities in PR protection," said He Ye, standing vice-chairman of China Sewing Machinery Association.

An official from Japan's association said the two sides deepened their understanding and boosted industrial development through a range of efforts including a large joint convention for the industry.

Anti-depressant TCM deal

Shanghai Innovative Research Center of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Fennopharma Corp of Finland recently agreed to cooperate in overseas clinical research and gauging the market potential of a new anti-depression drug called S111 that is derived from traditional Chinese medicine.

The center submitted an application for clinical tests of the medicine in early 2006 to the State Food and Drug Administration. It has also filed an application for an international patent on the drug.

Yahoo! loses copyright suit


The Beijing Higher People's Court upheld a lower court ruling that ordered Yahoo! China to pay damages to 11 major record companies for facilitating free music downloads.

Yahoo! China appealed to the Beijing Higher People's Court after losing the lawsuit at the Beijing No 2 Intermediary People's Court in April.

The Beijing No 2 Intermediary Court ordered Yahoo! China to pay 210,000 yuan in damages to the companies, which include EMI, Warner Music, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group. It also ordered the Web portal to remove links that enable Internet users to download songs from other sites.

The record companies began court proceedings in early January, saying that the music had been played or downloaded without their permission and asked for 5.5 million yuan in damages.

Yahoo! China insisted that it only provides links in its music search results and should not be held responsible for the content of third-party websites.

Patent applications grow

The SIPO said over a million patent applications have been accepted in the past 18 months, bringing the total to 4 million since 1985 when the country's Patent Law took effect.

The SIPO statistics showed it took 15 years for the number to reach the first million, 50 months to reach the second million, and only 27 months for the third million.

"It shows that the capability of China to accept patent applications has been improved and Chinese awareness of patent applications has been enhanced," said Wang Xiaohu, an official with the SIPO.

Of the latest million patent applications accepted, some 60.8 percent were made by Chinese applicants, while among the first million, 47.8 percent were made by Chinese.

In 2006, Chinese applications were up 30.8 percent over 2005, 20 percentage points higher than foreign applicants in the same period.

Business 'incubators'

China has 548 "incubators" for start-up companies, the second most in the world after the United States, statistics from the Ministry of Science and Technology indicated.

The so-called incubators have helped 19,896 hi-tech companies, of which 569 have annual revenue of more than 100 million yuan. In addition, 53 were listed on either domestic or overseas stock exchanges.

China originally borrowed the idea of incubators from the United States. They are designed to create a convenient and efficient environment for start-up companies, as well as in providing financing, tax and land incentives.

The country's first incubator project started in 1987 in Wuhan, capital of Central China's Hubei Province.

As part of the effort, the government and sate-funded policy banks are financing smaller venture capital funds, primarily for hi-tech research and development.