With WTO entry expected to remove trade barriers across the Strait, Taiwanese businessmen still face legal difficulties in tackling intellectual property rights (IPR) violations when doing business in China, a legal expert said yesterday.
"China's laws are complete, but its law enforcement is the most problematic among all economically active countries in the world," Thomas Tsai (蔡坤財), senior partner of Tsai, Lee & Chen (連邦事務所), said yesterday at a Taipei seminar on the arbitration of cross-strait trade disputes.
Yesterday's seminar was co-organized by the Arbitration Association of the Republic of China and Beijing-based China International Economic and Trade Arbitration Commission (CIETAC), which sent a group of 17 Chinese arbitrators to exchange views with their Taiwanese counterparts during their 10-day visit here.
The two arbitration groups will sign a decade-old memorandum today to address joint efforts and issues regarding using arbitration as an alternative to settle cross-strait trade disputes.
Tsai yesterday said China's local authorities are inclined to take sides with local counterfeiters, which generate revenue that helps regional economies prosper, by leaking information on impending raids to violators or by imposing light penalties on perpetrators.
As an example, he cited a case where Chinese authorities allowed food companies to take advantage of Taiwanese Want Want Group's (旺旺集團) brand name.
Visiting Chinese legal experts, however, insisted that major progress in legal and judicial IPR protection has been made in China.
Li Yong (李勇), a vice chairman of CIETAC, yesterday said that two recent lawsuits won by Taiwanese enterprises -- Want Want Group and Taisan Enterprise Co (泰山集團) -- proved China is improving the enforcement of IPR laws.
Want Want claimed victory in suing two rice cracker counterfeiters in China, whose products were immediately removed from store shelves. A Chinese court also ruled in favor of Taisan, which failed to patent its design of containers for its flagship dessert that was pirated by a Fujian-based company, based on China's law against unfair competition, Li said.
Li added that the unfair-competition law covers issues regarding the leaking of trade secrets, but Tsai argued that the lack of a specially designed trade-secret act in China has posed difficulties to high-tech industries seeking to protect their IPR.
Li said that the lack of an evidence law has crippled litigants' capabilities in gathering necessary evidence to be presented in court.
The high court, however, laid down several related regulations, which Li called a "crucial legal breakthrough," last year to further safeguard litigants' legal rights.
The regulations stipulate that, upon request, courts are obligated to collect and investigate evidence if litigants are confined to violations of personal privacy, classified national secrets or trade secrets.
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