Patent Law

The following is excerpted from a May 4, 2010 article by Laurie Whalen, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, published by AllBusiness:

The protection of U.S. intellectual property rights in China remains a challenge even though improvements in that country have been made, an expert from the University of Arkansas School of Law told a gathering of the Sebastian County Bar Association on Monday.

But the risk of having a manufacturing process copied or a product counterfeited is "inevitable when one makes a decision to trade," said Uche U. Ewelukwa, a law professor specializing in intellectual property law and Chinese trade.

"As Arkansas-China trade expands with that growth there's a big exposure" to intellectual property violations, Ewelukwa told a group of 40 people attending her lunch presentation...

In China, the most common industries to suffer intellectual property violations include clothing, computer science and food, according to data provided by Ewelukwa.

The UA professor reported improvements in the Chinese legal system, including the number of actionable cases.

The amount of litigated intellectual property cases has more than quadrupled over the past eight years.

There were more than 30,000 civil infringement cases to go to court last year compared with 6,000 cases litigated in China in 2002, the year the government put an education requirement in place for its judicial branch. Previously there was no educational criteria for judges, Ewelukwa said.

Read the full article here.