China to strengthen co-governance of IPR protection in e-commerce

BEIJING - China needs to improve its IPR protection governance system, with co-governance between government and platforms through online and offline efforts, a senior official said Thursday.

Co-governance can further improve the system of IPR in e-commerce, and enhance governance capability and efficiency, said Han Xiucheng, director of the Intellectual Property Development and Research Center of the National Intellectual Property Administration (NIPA).

Based on the current legal system, Chinese mainstream e-commerce platforms have established a set of platform rules, covering various types of relationships between business entities in the platform, of which IPR protection rules are particularly important, according to a report published by the NIPA.

The IPR protection rules established by the platform place the rules for identifying and punishing the selling of counterfeit commodities at the core, and the special IPR protection platform is dedicated to providing one-stop solutions for global IPR holders.

China has continuously strengthened administrative enforcement in e-commerce to effectively crack down on IPR infringement. Local intellectual property management departments have cooperated with e-commerce platforms to establish three handling modes for online patent infringement complaints, effectively integrating the case handling resources and handling capacity of local IPR offices, IPR protection and e-commerce platforms.

"E-commerce provides a strong driving force for economic development, but the cross-regional and virtual characteristics of e-commerce platforms also pose new challenges to the work of IPR protection," said Cao Hongying, deputy director of the IPR protection department of the NIPA. "After years of practice, China has achieved remarkable results in e-commerce IPR protection."

Cao said that in the next step, the focus will be on e-commerce to further strengthen IPR protection, strengthen cross-departmental and cross-regional law enforcement cooperation and government-enterprise cooperation, strengthen the role of mediation and arbitration in resolving IPR disputes, so as to form a joint protection force.