Tuesday, October 04, 2011

Netac President Complains About Unequal Treatment Overseas Patents

Netac Technology, the first Chinese company that sued a U.S. company (Texas PNY Technologies)  for patent infringement in 2006, and which settled out of court, expects that it has protected its IPR in all important markets by 2015.

Cheng Xiao-hua, president of Netac Technology alleges that it often takes a Chinese firm much longer to obtain a patent overseas than it does for its foreign counterparts. The next quote of Cheng suggests that this is the fault of the overseas patent office that is examining the Chinese patents.
"Cheng said he is expecting a better climate for Chinese companies in applying for patents overseas, and a more "equal examination period and fairer treatment"."

About which patent office his is talking remains unclear. It would be interesting to see this backed up by some statistics. 

Read China Daily's Zhang Shiyi's article here.

1 comment:

chinaipr said...

As far as I know, Netac was not exactly the first mainland Chinese company to sue foreign companies in the US for patent infringement. Power MosFET sued Infineon and others in the Eastern District of Texas in the late 90's on a Chinese patent. http://www.finnegan.com/files/Publication/133fa145-22a0-4c3c-8cc9-120cf00fde66/Presentation/PublicationAttachment/782b9b28-82a0-47b2-9a2f-16974bc8f861/03-1083%208-17-04.pdf. There may have been others. The inventor was Xingbi Chen, and assigned to a Chinese university. http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=5,216,275.PN.&OS=PN/5,216,275&RS=PN/5,216,275. There may have been others before then, and there were likely inventors from Taiwan.