The two-day Taiwan Corporate Intellectual Property conference opened at the Grand Hyatt Taipei yesterday with delegates embracing the latest issues regarding intellectual protection rights (IPR) protection in Asia and corporate intellectual property in Taiwan.
“The holding of this conference is aimed at passing intellectual property [IP] information to businesses in Taiwan through the sharing of experiences by speakers and lawyers with different IP expertise,” Stacey Lee (李貴敏), a senior partner at Baker & McKenzie and one of the speakers at the event, said in an interview yesterday.
A senior official from the Taiwan Intellectual Property Office (TIPO) said the office has striven to enhance the quality of patent information in Taiwan.
“For instance, the Legislative Yuan passed the Patent Attorney Act (專利律師法) in July last year, which took effect in January. In addition, the nation’s very first patent attorney examination will be held next month, which will be a big step toward the improvement of patent quality and service,” TIPO Secretary-General May Lee (李鎂) said in an opening speech.
The main IP problem worldwide is that most judges don’t have expertise in IP-related subjects and Taiwan is no exception, she said.
“Taiwan’s patent litigation has always been chaotic because judges lack the technical background to help them make a fair judgment when there is a technical argument,” she said.
But the July 1 launch of the nation’s first intellectual property court in Banciao (板橋), Taipei County, showed that Taiwan has surpassed many countries because there are only two to three IP courts in the world, Lee said.
Speakers shared their expertise on a wide range of topics at the conference organized by LexisNexis, including IP law and practice, management and exploitation of IP patent rights and IP in litigation.
Benjamin Wang (王本耀) from the Industrial Technology Research Institute (工研院) spoke in the afternoon session about the importance of collaboration between IP departments and R&D departments to move products from innovation to commercialization.
“Taiwan is currently ranked No. 4 in global patent application. Hence ICM [Intellectual Capital Management] is becoming more important for corporations big and small,” Wang said.
The institute has earned more than 11,000 patents since its inception and around 2,000 patents are filed each year, Wang said.
Anita Liang (梁玉英) from Inventec Corp (英業達), one of the world’s largest makers of notebook computers, discussed the firm’s IP involvement in China. She talked about China’s patent regulations as well as the 2007 China Annual Patent Report.
Nelson Yu (游能勝), who works for TIPLO Attorneys-at-Law (台灣國際專利法律事務所), spoke about patent strategy as a vanguard for corporate success, including patent enforcement strategy.
Thomas Colson, president and CEO of IP.com. discussed the best ways to set up and sustain an IPR protection system.
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