Farmers and food processors need to protect their intellectual property (IP) before foreigners snap up the rights to local favorites such as pearl-milk tea (
"Taiwan's agricultural products are fantastic, but no-one has packaged and licensed them overseas," corporate lawyer and IP specialist Paul Hsu (
Hsu was speaking at a seminar on the topic of establishing IPR (intellectual property rights) systems to enhance corporate competitiveness, organized by the Industrial Development Bureau, Ministry of Economic Affairs.
A good example of IP would be the kiwi fruit.
"The kiwi is an excellent example," Hsu said. "The kiwi tree is controlled by the New Zealanders who keep on improving it. It is biotech intellectual property. Recently they came out with the golden kiwi which is so much tastier."
Hsu took a straw poll of the seminar participants, a collection of several hundred industry leaders and members of the Chinese National Federation of Industries (
Hsu pointed out that while one can get a foreign-made burger all around Taipei, purchasing an unfried spring roll would involve a focused search in a night market. He wondered aloud why nobody from Taiwan had franchised the spring roll.
"Anyone can make hamburgers, but few can turn it into a franchise," he said. "Taiwanese shouldn't think traditional businesses are the end of the road, we just need a new business model."
Unfortunately, many products have difficulties securing patents. Pearl-milk tea, for example -- a Taiwanese creation -- is popular in California and New York, but the stores that sell it are not all Taiwanese, nor do the Taiwanese earn royalties on each sale.
"A patent has to involve a high-level of creation that employs natural processes. Pearl-milk tea doesn't fall under this," said Ainoon Shabirin, a paralegal specializing in patent law at Winkler Partners attorneys-at-law in Taipei.
Article 20 of the patent law says that in order to be patentable, an invention must be novel, inventive, and industrially applicable, she said.
Milk tea is not novel, but she conceded that the pearls could be, especially if the Taiwanese patented the process by which they are made.
"Then all pearls produced could be patented," she said. "The same would be true for spring rolls. If someone came up with a machine that makes spring rolls quickly, that could be patented."
Patents are not the only way to protect IP, Hsu said. It's possible to use other methods, like the protection of trade secrets. This is the method Coca Cola used to protect its syrup recipe, which was never patented. If it had been, the patent would have expired by now, making the syrup open to the company's competitors.
The new business models won't come cheap.
"As well as good lawyers, [farmers will] need good marketing and financial support," Hsu said.
Smaller farmers could use talent within their own families, but individuals could also call upon the support of farming cooperatives to fund the process of protecting their IP and benefiting from the protection.
High-tech firms in Taiwan recognized early that IPR protection would be important in the WTO, and firms such as Winkler and Hsu's Lee and Li Attorneys-at-Law (
"The agriculture sector didn't pay any attention to IP in the past," Hsu said.
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
‘SHORT TERM’: The local currency would likely remain strong in the near term, driven by anticipated US trade pressure, capital inflows and expectations of a US Fed rate cut The US dollar is expected to fall below NT$30 in the near term, as traders anticipate increased pressure from Washington for Taiwan to allow the New Taiwan dollar to appreciate, Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) chief economist Lin Chi-chao (林啟超) said. Following a sharp drop in the greenback against the NT dollar on Friday, Lin told the Central News Agency that the local currency is likely to remain strong in the short term, driven in part by market psychology surrounding anticipated US policy pressure. On Friday, the US dollar fell NT$0.953, or 3.07 percent, closing at NT$31.064 — its lowest level since Jan.
The New Taiwan dollar and Taiwanese stocks surged on signs that trade tensions between the world’s top two economies might start easing and as US tech earnings boosted the outlook of the nation’s semiconductor exports. The NT dollar strengthened as much as 3.8 percent versus the US dollar to 30.815, the biggest intraday gain since January 2011, closing at NT$31.064. The benchmark TAIEX jumped 2.73 percent to outperform the region’s equity gauges. Outlook for global trade improved after China said it is assessing possible trade talks with the US, providing a boost for the nation’s currency and shares. As the NT dollar
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
RSS