New Amendments of Chinese Trademark Law will Provide Stronger Protection to Trademark Owner in Good Faith

• Citation: jd0096
• Date: 05 May 2019
• Published date: 05/05/2019
• Subject Matter: Intellectual Property

2020/11/4 New Amendments of Chinese Trademark Law will Provide Stronger Protection to Trademark Owner in Good Faith | China Law Insight

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CHINA LAW INSIGHT

New Amendments of Chinese Trademark Law will

Provide Stronger Protection to Trademark Owner

in Good Faith

By King & Wood Mallesons on May 5, 2019

This article was written by Ding Xianjie (Partner).

Approved and announced by the Standing Committee of National People’s Congress on

April 23, 2019, new amendments of Chinese Trademark Law become effective on

November 1, 2019. Focusing on the attempts to stop trademark squatters and trademark

infringement, six articles of the current Trademark Law are amended.

According to the amendments, any trademark applications which are filed in bad faith for

purpose other than use should be rejected (Article 4). Accordingly, any such application

can be opposed by anyone within opposition period (Article 33), or can be invalidated

after its registration (Article 44), and administrative warning and/or penalty may be issued

for such kind of bad faith applications (Article 68). Furthermore, any trademark agencies

shall not accept the entrustments from the applicants of such applications (Article 19).

According to the amendments, for trademark infringement committed in bad faith with

serious circumstances, the amount of damages can be up to five times of the amount

calculated on normal basis (current law regulates “three times”); and the statutory amount

of damages can be up to five million (current law provides “three million”) Chinese Yuan

(Article 63). Furthermore, the new amendments also regulate that, upon the request of

the trademark owner, the counterfeited goods and the materials/tools primarily used for