Crystal Chen

Liu holds a utility model (“UM”) patent M508941 for an umbrella featuring a foldable shell; the patent was granted on September 21, 2015. From September 22, 2015 to December of the same year, Liu sent warning letters to several Taiwanese online marketplaces, including GOMAJI, Buy123, 17Life and Poya, alleging that umbrella products provided by Splendors Biotech Co., LTD. were infringing on UM M’941. In order to avoid legal disputes, some marketplaces removed Splendors’ umbrella products.

With the advent of the World IP Day on April 22, the Supreme People’s Court (“SPC”) reported at its press conference the overall development status of IP judicial protection in Chinese courts. According to the SPC, more than 540,000 first instance, second instance and retrial cases relating to IP were docketed by Chinese courts last year. Compared with 2022, the number of closed cases and the number of newly-received cases were up by 3.41% and 0.13%, respectively.

Taiwan, intellectual property protection for new plants is provided through plant variety rights. The five statutory requirements for a new plant variety right are novelty, proper variety name, distinctness, uniformity and stability. The first two are formality requirements, whereas the latter three are substantive ones.