In the Special 301 Report, The United States exposes a positive tendency in the intellectual property rights protection and enforcement policies in China. Some legal amendments even permit a good cooperation between The US and China. On the other hand, there still exist issues regarding appropriate intellectual property rights protection in China for patents, copyrights, trademarks trade secrets as well as protection against unfair commercial use or unauthorized disclosure of test and other data generated to obtain marketing approval for pharmaceutical products. Consequently, the sales in China are low, especially for such a big market, just because foreign rights holders still experience IPR difficulties on the Chinese market.
The theft of trade secrets in China is strongly highlighted by USTR:” The United States strongly urges the Chinese government to take serious steps to put an end to these activities and to deter further activity by rigorously investigating and prosecuting trade secret thefts conducted by both cyber and conventional means.”
The points of focus for China that The US will continue to monitor and evaluate are: legal reforms, trade secrets theft, software piracy and Internet piracy, counterfeiting goods, intellectual property rights protection for pharmaceutical products, utility model and design patents.
The entire report can be found here.
