Amended Chinese Trademark Law & its Implementation Regulations Take Effect
in Concurrence on 1 May 2014
China has recently promulgated the amendments to the Implementation Regulations of its Trademark Law to assist the implementation of the amended Chinese Trademark Law adopted in August 2013. Both have taken effect as of 1 May 2014.
The amended Implementation Regulations comprise 98 rules in 10 chapters, among which Chapter 5 is a new one consisting of 17 rules that focus on international trademark application, covering the eligibility conditions, procedures, and examination of the application.
To align with the allowance for multi-class applications in the amended Trademark Law, the amended Implementation Regulations stipulate that in case of rejection of a multi-class application, the applicant may seek divided application for registration of trademark used on the product which is preliminary allowed, while the result of reexamination of the application on the rejected product is pending.
The amended Implementation Regulations also specify in more detail some conditions, standards and procedures stated in the Trademark Law. For example, "provide a person with conveniences for such person's infringement" in the Trademark Law (Article 57, item 6) is expounded in the amended Implementation Regulations (Rule 75) as "provide a person's infringement with storing, transportation, mailing, printing, shelter, operation premises, and online commodity trading platform".
Furthermore, the amended Implementation Regulations (Rule 78) list those factors that may be taken into account when calculating the "illegal turnover" mentioned in Article 60 of the Trademark Law.
