Taiwan and China have made progress in cross-strait intellectual property rights (IPR) protection and cooperation after both sides inked an agreement in June to beef up efforts in the area, the Ministry of Economic Affair’s Intellectual Property Office said yesterday.
China has received 72 cases from Taiwan for the acknowledgment of priority rights, while Taiwan has received 11 cases from China since the official operation mechanism started on Nov. 22, the office said.
Mutual cross-strait acknowledgment of priority rights protects IPRs formally registered by companies.
That is, if a Taiwanese firm has registered a patent at home, its priority rights will be recognized in China, meaning its patents will also be honored there.
In the past, Taiwanese firms had to register patents in Taiwan and China at the same time to ensure their IPRs were fully protected when they carried out business activities across the Taiwan Strait.
The signing of the cross-strait IPR protection agreement became critical as about 21,000 patents are filed by Taiwanese firms in China every year, the office said.
These firms are mostly in the semiconductor, communications and electronics industries.
On the other hand, Chinese firms are only filing about 700 patents in Taiwan every year, according to the office’s statistics.
“The priority acknowledgment mechanism will help protect the research and development efforts of Taiwanese companies, especially those involved in -technology-intensive sectors such as handsets, panels and LEDs,” Wang Mei-hua (王美花), director-general of the Intellectual Property Office, told reporters.
Meanwhile, the office said it has received 34 requests for assistance from Taiwanese enterprises as they have faced difficulties in applying for IPR protection in China.
Nine cases have been resolved so far and 25 more are ongoing, the office said.
Wang also said that starting from last month, Taiwanese -record companies could apply for copyright recognition with the Taiwan Association for Copyrights Protection (TACP, 台灣著作權保護協會), before marketing their albums in China.
TACP will process the cases within three days.
In the past, record companies had to file their copyright recognition through Hong Kong, which would take three to five months to process and thus delay the launch of Taiwanese albums in China, Wang said.
In addition to patents and copyrights, other IPRs covered in the cross-strait agreement include trademarks and plant variety rights.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained