News from the General Administration of Customs of People's Republic of China reveals that, on June 14th 2006, the Global Anti-Counterfeiting Group presented the "Global Anti-Counterfeiting Awards 2005 (Public organizations ? government departments)" to China Customs. The award is to recognize China Customs for its efforts, achievements and transparency in protecting intellectual property rights. This is the first time that a Chinese governmental IP-enforcement department won a global award.

 

June 14th is "Global Anti-Counterfeiting Day". On that day, the Global Anti-Counterfeiting Group held the award-presenting ceremony in Paris. This Group is a non-governmental organization (NGO) that specializes in intellectual property rights protections and anti-counterfeit tasks around the world. The Group was established in 1901 with headquarters in Paris. To encourage all countries and regions in the world to carry out anti-counterfeiting tasks, the Group has set up various awards in recent years to pay tribute to any government law-enforcement departments, enterprises, non-governmental organizations and media that contribute greatly to the enforcement of IP-related laws and regulations. Government departments from 10 countries participated in the competition of the 2005 Award, and China Customs and Italy Customs were the two final winners.

 

China Customs began its IP protection tasks in the import/export process since 1994. Up until 2005, customs all over China have handled 5,571 import/export products IP infringement cases with the total value of RMB730 million. In particular, since China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), the number of infringement cases found at China Customs has been growing by 30% on average every year.

 

Faced with the rapid growth of China's external trade, China Customs use risk-management tactics to purposefully monitor import and export goods via broad collection of infringement information, paying more attention to the examination and approval to the custom clearance documents and tighten the inspection to crucial commodities. These actions have increase the preciseness of spotting patent and trademark infringing goods. Take Ning-Po Custom for example. From January 2005 to February 2006, Ning-Po Custom announced, in total, 54 articles concerning the monitoring of intellectual property rights and found 30 cases of infringements. The rate of precise spotting of patent and trademark infringing goods is as high as 56%.

 

China Customs aggressively developed cooperation with the business circle to work on anti-counterfeiting. They took the initiatives to invite enterprises to come to the Customs to give trainings on how to identify counterfeited goods. When they learned that the problem of counterfeits goods of "NIKE" and its trademark is relatively more serious, China Customs, without the request from NIKE, strengthened the monitoring of the import and export of NIKE-related products and have thus continuously caught a large quantity of counterfeited "NIKE" clothing, shoes and hats that would have been exported. In 2005, only a year's time, customs around the country uncovered more than 190 "NIKE" trademark infringements, accounting roughly one-sixth of the total number of infringement cases unearthed by all national customs. This result effectively protected NIKE's legal rights and increased the company's confidence in investing in China.

 

China Customs also work actively with establishing law-enforcement alliance of protecting intellectual property rights with customs of relevant countries (regions). So far, China Customs have worked with HKSAR Customs, U.S. Customs, EU Customs and Japan Customs for quite a number of times in terms of information exchange, law-enforcement trainings, law-enforcement experiences sharing and communications among staff. In the meantime, Guangdong Custom and HKSAR Customs have initially set up the intellectual property rights protection, communication and coordination system. Both customs have achieved valuable results in combating counterfeiting and copyright infringements in Guangdong and Hong Kong.

2006-07-04

2006-07-04