Written by:Xu Jing Ye Wanli(Intellectual Property)
Fighting against trademark piracy has become one of the priorities in the governance of trademark system in China for years, which has also been a long-time headache to genuine brand owners. The most common strategy is to file oppositions to defeat registration of the pirate marks, in order to avoid market confusion among the public if the pirate marks are used for commerce. While most of the bad-faith filing can be defeated at the early stage under the current practice, the strategy incurs significant costs for genuine brand owners – legal costs, such as attorney fees for filing oppositions, are substantially higher than the costs of trademark pirates. This imbalance of costs makes trademark piracy “unstoppable”, resulting in continuous and strong interference with ordinary business operation of genuine brand owners.