International Law

There?s Enforcement, and Then There?s Enforcement

By Stan

Very interesting post on IP Dragon about one company’s struggle with patent infringement in various countries. The following passage was of particular interest to me:

Even though we have enforceable Taiwanese and Chinese patents issued, we have had no success in stopping any Asian companies. We even won at court in Taiwan, and it really did no good whatsoever. Perhaps it would be a little different for us if we were a Taiwanese company.

Without more detail, I’m not really sure what this all means. This sparks my curiosity. Here’s a company who had a valid patent, took on an infringer in court, and won the case. However, it "did no good whatsoever."

Hmm. Several possibilities here. The one that comes to mind first is that although this patent owner enforced its rights, it may have run into problems enforcing the court judgment. This is an issue that a lot of folks forget. It’s one thing to get a judge somewhere to award damages to a plaintiff, and that shouldn’t be minimized. However, that judgment is pretty much worthless if you cannot get the defendant to pay you.

Lot’s of other scenarios of course. Could be that the market was saturated with other infringers, and stopping one didn’t do much in the aggregate. Could be that this company started their infringing activities again and the patent holder had to initiate a new action. This took place in Taiwan, but these are the exact same issues we deal with here.

This is all another way of explaining why, when clients ask me why IP enforcement in China can be difficult, my answer is "It’s complicated."

Full post as published by China Hearsay on March 20, 2008 (boomark / email).