Thursday, September 17, 2009

IPR Protection For Traditional Chinese Medicine Needed

On April 1st, IP Dragon wrote about how to protect Traditional Chinese Medicine, see here. And it was certainly not an April Fool's Day joke. But a lot in this fields need to be done. Exactly that is pointed out by the State Council (the highest legislative body) which came up (April 21st, 2009) with "Some Opinions of the State Council on Supporting and Promoting the Development of the Traditional Chinese Medicine Industry, No. 22, 2009."

Relevant passages are:

IV. Promoting the TCM inheritance and innovation
ii. (..) You should strengthen the support and protection of famous brands, famous trademarks in the TCM industry; optimize the export structure of TCM products, enhance the added value of export TCM products, and support TCM enterprise to expand the global market.

iv. Strengthening the TCM legal system construction and the intellectual property protection: we should actively promote the legislation process of TCM, improve laws and regulations, strengthen TCM intellectual property protection and utilization, improve the TCM patent examination standards and the TCM species protection system, study and formulate a TCM traditional knowledge protection inventory, and gradually build a special TCM traditional knowledge protection system; and should strengthen the origin protection of good and genuine TCM materials, and transform the advantage of good and genuine medicine materials into the intellectual property advantage.

v. Strengthening the management of the TCM industry: the regions and departments concerned should strengthen the unified planning of the TCM industry, and manage the TCM in accordance with its characteristics and rules; should promote the TCM informationisation construction, build and improve a comprehensive statistical system; should promote the TCM standardization construction, build a standard system, and promote the transformation of China’s TCM standards into international standards; should rigidly supervise TCM law enforcement, heavily strike the acts of illegal medical practice in the name of counterfeit TCM, releasing false or illegal TCM advertisements, manufacturing or selling counterfeit or inferior TCM; and should strengthen the construction of local TCM management agencies, reinforce their management functions and enhance their management levels.

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