New Developments on the Customs Enforcement of IPR in China

A new online filing system concerning customs enforcement of intellectual property rights has been launched by the General Administration of Customs (“GAC”) from 1 March 2014. The new online filing system brings about the following key changes:

E-Filing Simplified

China prohibits the import and export of goods that infringe upon intellectual property rights. Rightholders are entitled to file their intellectual property rights with the GAC. After the GAC has accepted the filing, the local customs are obliged to inform the rightholders of the consignment of goods suspected of infringing the intellectual property rights. As of 24 March 2014, the GAC has accepted filing for 22,336 pieces of intellectual property rights. Among them, 16,021 are trade mark rights, 992 are copyrights and 5,323 are patent rights (including inventions, utility models and new designs). Under former practice, the rightholders had to submit a hardcopy of the filing documents to the GAC after they completed a standard application form online. With the implementation of the new online filing system, purely e-filing is sufficient and no hardcopy is necessary to be submitted to the GAC. Therefore, the formalities for filing new intellectual property rights with the GAC are simplified under the new online filing system.

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