28 February 2022
China officially submitted the accession documents to join the Hague System, as well as to join the Marrakesh Treaty, to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) when director general Daren Tang visited the country to attend the opening of the Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games. The accessions will come into force on May 5, 2022.
According to WIPO, Chinese residents filed as many as 795,504 designs in 2020, amounting to 55 percent of the worldwide total. Soon these Chinese designers will be given an easier means with the Hague System, in which they can register their industrial designs simultaneously in multiple jurisdictions that have also joined the system. Instead of filing individual national or regional applications, they will only need to submit one international application with one set of fees. Likewise, designers from over 90 jurisdictions that have joined the system will also be able to protect their designs in China via an international application.
Xia Zheng, founder of AFD China Intellectual Property Law Office in Beijing, said that it will become easier for the design community in China to protect and take their designs out of China, and for international designers to enter their designs into one of the world’s largest and most-dynamic markets. “This is not only conducive to China’s active integration into the global system of industrial design, advancing the innovation capability of industrial design, globalizing Chinese creativity, designs and manufacturing, but also conducive to promoting the development of the global industrial designs. At the same time, it will also play a powerful role in deepening China’s participation in the global intellectual property governance under the WIPO framework.”
However, the convenience brought by the Hague System does not mean that applicants are free from challenges in the protection of industrial designs. “Although the Hague international design application can save significant administrative time and costs compared to filing separately in each territory and allows many national applications to be filed in a single language, meeting the requirements of several national jurisdictions can be tricky and challenging to the applicants,” Zheng said. “Indeed, different countries would have fundamentally different formal requirements, which may leave the applicant physically unable to meet all requirements on filing in most of time. Such differences in requirements may cause headaches when changes must be made after filing and may even result in unintended effects on the scope of protection where features of design representations are interpreted in different ways in different countries.”
Also in force on May 5 is China’s accession to the Marrakesh Treaty, which is expected to benefit over 17 million blind and visually impaired people in China by bringing them greater access to copyrighted works. Moreover, it will increase the international transfer of barrier-free Chinese works for the visually impaired in other parts of the world to access as well. “This is the only human right treaty in the field of copyright, which further guarantees equal access to literacy and education for persons with visual impairment and print disabilities,” Zheng said.
“Overall, China’s accession to these two treaties marks a significant progress in the global intellectual property ecosystem,” she said.
Ivy Choi
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