The Ministry of Economic Affairs will launch the nation's first intellectual property court on July 1 in a bid to further protect intellectual property rights (IPR) and improve Taiwan's reputation in the international community.
“Following the establishment of an intellectual property court, the ministry can concentrate its legal resources to help resolve intellectual property conflicts and better protect the rights of intellectual property holders,” said Margaret Chen (陳淑美), the deputy director general of the ministry’s Intellectual Property Office (IPO) yesterday.
She added that this judicial milestone would also help promote greater competitiveness among the nation’s industries.
The court would be the latest move in the country’s campaign to better defend intellectual property rights at home.
Taiwan was placed on the Priority Watch List — which is for countries that do not provide an adequate level of IPR protection or enforcement — in the US Trade Representative’s (USTR) “Special 301” report for four years at the beginning of the decade.
But the US improved Taiwan’s classification in 2004 when it promoted Taiwan to the less onerous Watch List.
The USTR plans this year to initiate an out-of-cycle review to monitor progress on “selected outstanding issues” to assess whether to completely remove Taiwan from the list.
The USTR has been urging Taiwan to set up the specialized IPR court to continue its efforts to combat counterfeiting and Internet piracy.
Chen said eight judges have been selected to date to take on the 1,600 to 2,500 IPR cases that arise per year.
“We will increase the number of judges when the IPR cases show an increase in number,” she added.
Citing another potential improvement in the nation’s IPR protection, Chen said the legislature will meet on Thursday to screen a Cabinet-approved amendment regarding the Protocol Amending the Agreement on Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) under the WTO.
The Cabinet’s amendment concerns Article 31 of the TRIPS agreement, which aims to combat fatal diseases such as HIV/AIDS.
The protocol proposed a compulsory licensing system to authorize pharmaceutical companies in eligible WTO member states to manufacture and export cheaper generic drugs to less developed nations, without having to pay the patent holders.
The WTO’s General Council has asked all its member nations to obtain approval from their own lawmakers and to notify the WTO no later than Dec. 31 next year.
In addition to the amendment, Chen said Taiwan’s patent regulations would also have to be revised to waive the intellectual property rights on certain drugs before Taiwan could notify the WTO of its formal adoption of the measure.
“At present 15 of the 150 WTO member states have notified the general council of their acceptance of the TRIPS, including the US, Japan, China, Australia, Sweden and South Korea,” she said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater