The Greater China IP Updates – March 2024

TIPO Announces Updates to the Trademark Classification for Goods and Services

The Taiwan Intellectual Property Office has made adjustments to the designated goods and services names in trademark applications in response to the latest (12^th) edition of the Nice Classification list.  A total of 422 items have been added and 56 items have been deleted.  An additional 15 modifications have been made to class/subclass names or annotations, as well as 25 corrections.  The aforementioned changes took effect on January 1, 2024.  The list of designated goods/services categories and names will be updated on the online trademark filing system as well.  The official timeline of website updates will be published on the website of the TIPO Information Management Office.   Applicants wishing to use the fast-track mechanism on the online trademark filing system after January 1, 2024, will be able to download the latest updates.  This will ensure consistency between the designated goods/services names stated in the application and the content in the electronic filing system, avoiding discrepancies that could jeopardize eligibility for the fast-track mechanism, as well as associated fee reductions.

Taiwan’s TSMC Top Applicant for Patents for Eighth Year

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s largest contract chipmaker, applied for the most patents out of any Taiwanese entity last year for the 8^th consecutive year, the Ministry of Economic Affairs announced in February.  TSMC filed 1,956 invention patent applications in 2023, which is the company’s most ever and 28% more than in 2022.  By being the largest patent applicant in Taiwan, it also drives the growth of upstream IC design and also downstream IC packaging and testing services.  The Taiwan Intellectual Property Office spokesman said that the efforts of TSMC and other technology firms to boost their patent portfolios show that Taiwan has become a hub for the global semiconductor industry.  Among foreign companies in Taiwan, Samsung Electronics Co. of South Korea was the top applicant in Taiwan in 2023 for the 1^st time.  Samsung submitted 978 patent applications in Taiwan, up 45% from 2022, and 977 were for invention patents.  The second highest foreign source of patent applications was from US semiconductor equipment supplier Applied Materials with 779 applications followed by US-based smartphone IC designer Qualcomm with 639.  In 4^th place was Japanese semiconductor and display production equipment supplier Tokyo Electron Ltd. with 555 applications followed by Japanese electrical product maker Nitto Denko Corp. with 478.  Amongst Taiwanese applicants, smartphone IC designer MediaTek Inc. came in 2^nd with 544 applications, up 32% from 2022.  In 3^rd place was flat-panel maker AUO Corp. with 460 applications, followed by PC brand Acer with 419 and Dram supplier Nanya Technology Corp. with 373.  All in all, last year patent applications by local companies grew for the 7^th consecutive year with a total of 12,922, an increase of 1%, while foreign companies filed a total of 14,910 applications up 2% from last year.

Chinese Court Recognizes the Copyright of an Image Generated Via Artificial Intelligence

In the first judgement of its kind in China, the Beijing Internet Court last November ruled that a picture, generated via the text-to-image software Stable Diffusion, should be considered an artwork under the protection of copyright laws due to the originality factor and intellectual input of its human creator.  Although the ruling has added fuel to heated arguments on whether AI-generated content should be protected by copyright laws, the Beijing Internet Court has asserted that future disputes about an author’s personal expression in images created with AI’s help should be judged on a case-by-case basis.  The intellectual property infringement lawsuit was initiated in May 2023 by the plaintiff who used the US start-up StabilityAI’s Stable Diffusion program to create an image of a young Asian woman and posted it on a Chinese social media platform.  A blogger allegedly used that image without permission in a post on Baijiahao, a Chinese content-sharing platform owned by Baidu.  In the court case, the ruling was in favour of the original creator because it was an artwork that had been worked on with continuously added prompts and adjusted parameters according to the plaintiff’s aesthetic choice and personalized judgement.  Zhu, the presiding judge, said that the ruling was made with the potential implications for emerging industries in mind.  It is expected that China’s generative AI industry is forecast to contribute 30 trillion yuan worth of economic value by 2035, accounting for a third of the industry’s global value, indicating a huge potential for growth in the intellectual property field.

Trademark Registrations in China Decrease 29% in 2023

The China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) recently released data showing that Chinese trademark registrations were down 29% in 2023 compared to 2022.  That means there were 1,794,500 fewer trademark registrations in 2023 compared to 2022.  Foreigners registered 3.1% of the trademarks in 2023 compared to 2.9% in 2022, but the 134,776 registrations in 2023 was a decrease in absolute numbers of 40,696 registrations from 2022.  CNIPA did not provide any reasons for the drop in trademark grants, but several factors may be at play including the crackdown on malicious trademark applications, a slowing economy in general, and the end of lockdowns in late 2022 which led to an uptick in Covid-19 infections and the obvious side effect of worker absence.  Hu Wenhui, Deputy Commissioner of CNIPA, stated that CNIPA cracked down on a total of 249,000 malicious registrations of trademarks in 2023, so the inevitable conclusion is that the crackdown was indeed the most likely factor indicating a shift from quantity to quality in trademark processing which is a reflection of what has been happening in the patent field.