Patent Law in Greater China: a new title

Patent Law In Greater China, edited by Stefan Luginbuehl and Peter Ganea, has just been published by Edward Elgar Publishing as part of its Intellectual Property Law an Practice series, which itself is co-edited by two Katfriends, practitioner Trevor Cook and academic Jo Gibson. Stefan, incidentally, is an attorney at the European Patent Office (Eponia), while Peter lectures and researches in the Interdisciplinary Centre for East Asian Studies of the, Goethe University, Frankfurt. The book is enriched by the choice of a strong cast of contributors, some of whose earlier works this Kat has either read or indeed edited

Having had the opportunity to see this book ahead of publication, when asked to give an approbation of it for the website and back cover, this Kat has to confess that he had some reservations about agreeing to do so. Too many China IP books in his experience have suffered from the three vices, listed in increasing degrees of severity, of being (i) out of date to the point at which they were of more historical than practical value, (ii) often unclear in terms of their description and analysis of Chinese law and its applicability to the sort of problems that regularly beset IP owners whose rights have been (or are alleged to have been) infringed and (iii) dull. In the event, this Kat was pleasantly surprised. He wrote:

"Chinese intellectual property law has been one of the fields in which it has been most difficult to obtain an accurate, reliable and intelligible perspective. The achievement in putting together Patent Law in Greater China is therefore all the more laudable. Chapters from practitioners, administrators, academics and the business world give this work a degree of relevance and immediacy and show how the complex and initially puzzling interplay of law and practice in China and the economies within her orbit can be depicted and understood".

This is how the publishers describe it, in part:

"This book provides a comprehensive introduction to patent policy, law and practice in Greater China [which for these purposes includes Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau] and will be a go-to book for patent practitioners who have client interests in that region.  Features [include]:

• Introduction to Chinese patent policy.

• Detailed coverage of technology transfer and substantive patent law in China, including prerequisites for protection, exceptions and limitations.

• Practical analysis of patent law relating to three specific fields of invention: employee inventions, biotechnological and pharmaceutical inventions, and software inventions.

• Overview of the patent application and examination procedure, with a particular view on PCT applications.

• Insight into specific characteristics of enforcement mechanisms and jurisprudence in China, including the dual enforcement system, claim interpretation, infringement types, and invalidity procedures.

• Invaluable section on the relationship between patent and antitrust law, including practical realities in the sphere of anticompetitive licensing.  ...

Not listed by the publishers but of potential interest and value to the reader are the book's coverage of design patents and utility models; the text is also replete with references and further reading -- in a wider variety of languages than this Kat can cope with.  The presentation of this volume has a genuine practitioners'-work feel to it, with numbered paragraphs and a handsome font. Well done, everyone!

Bibliographic data: Hardback. li + 469 pages. Hardback ISBN 978 1 78195 483 6; ebook ISBN 978 1 78195 484 3. Price: hardback $230 (online from the publisher, $207). Rupture factor: substantial. Book's web page here.