On 13 January 2023, the China National Intellectual Property Administration (“CNIPA”) published draft amendments to the PRC Trademark Law for public comment. This Draft marks the fifth time the PRC Trademark Law has been up for revision since its adoption in 1982. China’s trademark system has long suffered from large amounts of bad faith filings, from crushing amounts of applications and from a substantial portion of marks that are not used in commerce.

These issues are seen to drain both the administration’s and genuine brand owners’ resources, and the 2019 version of the Law as well as the new Draft aim to tackle these issues head-on. The proposed changes focus mainly on three aspects: curbing bad faith filings, emphasising the use requirement and reducing the enormous filing volume of trademark applications. The current 2019 version of the Law already made significant attempts to improve the legal framework but is still considered to fall short in a number of these areas.

In this webinar, Stephen Yang and Nina Li of IP March will discuss reasons why the trademarks law has been amended, the impact on new trademark registrations and what impact the new amendment will have on new and existing filers of trademarks in China.

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