In March, An Qinghu, who was appointed CTMO director-general in 2001, left the Office to become director-general of the foreign affairs department of the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC), the organization that oversees CTMO and TRAB.
Thomas Pattloch, IP officer at the EU delegation in Beijing, told Managing IP that An Qinghu left “in the normal order of things”. He is replaced by Li Jianchang, from the department of general affairs in SAIC. Li does not have an IP background but sources say that he has made a positive impression so far.
At TRAB, Xu Ruibiao has replaced Hu Lin as commissioner. Xu was previously head of the Enterprise Registration Bureau at TRAB. Zhou Zhongqi, vice-president of CCPIT Patent and Trade Mark Law Office, said that there has also been “a dramatic change in personnel” at lower levels at both CTMO and TRAB with a number of new deputy commissioners and division directors appointed.
The SAIC has now gone on a hiring spree. Sources have confirmed that the organization is recruiting 400 new examiners on three-year contracts: 300 for CTMO and 100 for TRAB.
Linda Chang, an executive for Rouse & Co in Shanghai, told Managing IP that at present CTMO has 142 examiners, 86 of whom deal with domestic applications – the part with the heaviest backlog. TRAB is reported to have fewer than 50 examiners.
Zhou also told Managing IP that the SAIC has found a location in Beijing to build an additional building for CTMO to further increase capacity.
Trade mark holders in China will be hoping that the new management and recruits can help reduce the waiting times for trade mark registration, opposition and cancellation actions.
“The problem is getting worse,” according to Doug Clark, a partner of Lovells in Shanghai. He welcomed the additional examiners, but questioned whether they would have the skills that are needed. He believes the Office also needs to improve its efficiency: “At this stage, what is needed is a push for greater productivity, at the possible expense of quality, just to clear the backlog,” he says.
Lovells recently conducted a survey of China’s Trade Mark Gazette and looked at the date of applications advertised for opposition on December 20 2007. It found that the average time from application to registration is now three years and two months. All service marks (classes 35 to 45) take over three and a half years. Applications filed in 2001 and 2002 took just one year to 18 months.
Lovells also looked at the time taken from publication in the Trade Mark Gazette to the date of opposition decisions published in Volume 31 of the Special Publication of Trademark Opposition Decisions in late June and July 2007. The firm found that most oppositions took just under five years. The total time from application to opposition decision was around six and a half years.
It was not possible for Lovells to calculate exactly the time needed for cancellation actions from the Trade Mark Gazette, but the firm estimates that bad-faith cancellation actions take at least five years.
The personnel changes are understood to have slowed down the progress of proposed amendments to China’s Trademark Law. The government circulated the latest draft of the amendments last August and observers believe that the changes will not now be passed until 2009.
