China: Do Just ONE Thing: Register Your Trademarks AND Your Design Patents, Part 1

By Dan Harris

Okay, so that’s two, but you get the point.

Way back in 2011, I wrote a blog post entitled, China: Do Just One Thing. Trademarks. As you can guess from the title, the point of that post was to emphasize that no matter what else a foreign company does when doing business in or with China, it must, must, must file to secure China trademarks for its trade names and logos, because if it does not, someone else will and then the foreign company will not be able to use its trade names or logos in China, even if all it is doing is having its products made in China for export.

In talking with foreign companies looking to do business in or with China, I talk about how NNN Agreements can help prevent their China counter-party from competing with them, contacting their clients/customers, and duplicating their products. And if they are going to be manufacturing in China, I tell them about the importance of Product Development Agreements for protecting their intellectual property before their product is fully developed, and Manufacturing Agreements for protecting their intellectual property after their product is developed and for ensuring quality and timely deliveries.

These agreements are all very important and in some cases, not having one can be fatal to a company. But with the exception of an NNN Agreement, they are relatively expensive and in some cases — rightly or wrongly (almost always wrongly), we get foreign companies who believe that their Chinese counter-party can be fully trusted and such agreements are just not worth it to them. I have better things to do than to argue with such an analysis and so I don’t.

But when it comes to the need to have a trademark, I always fight back because I and the other China lawyers at my firm have seen far too many companies go under after having lost their trademark to China and having their goods seized at China customs for violating someone else’s trademark and then not being able to switch their manufacturing to some country other than China. When it comes to the need to secure the appropriate trademarks in China, I am blunt: anyone who doesn’t do it is making a big mistake:

I tell them how if they do nothing else, they should immediately register their trademarks in China. This one usually surprises them and they often think I have misunderstood what they are planning for China. They at first do not understand why I am emphasizing the need for their filing a trademark in China when they have no plans to sell their product in China. I then explain how China is a first to file country, which means that, with very few exceptions, whoever files for a particular trademark in a particular category gets it. So if the name of your company is XYZ and you make shoes and you have been manufacturing your shoes in China for the last three years and someone registers the “XYZ” trademark for shoes, that company gets the trademark. And then, armed with the XYZ  trademark, that company has every right to stop your XYZ shoes from leaving China because they violate that other company’s trademark.

And this happens constantly.

About a year ago, we started seeing the same thing with design patents and in tomorrow’s post I will explain how that works and what you need to do to prevent it.