"The King of Fairy Tales" Zheng Yuanjie bids farewell to fairy tales. It will take 335 years to retrieve all the trademarks?
Shuke, Beta, Pipiru, Rusisi, these names that have accompanied many "post-80s", "post-90s" and even "post-00s" to grow up are published all year round in the "Fairy Tale King" founded in 1985, and in January next year, This publication, which has published 495 issues and has printed more than 200 million copies, will be suspended.
Looking at Zheng Yuanjie's Weibo, we can find that in addition to frequent interactions with young readers, this writer of "5G surfing" is more about defending the rights of the characters in his book.
On November 15, Zheng Yuanjie published "A Letter from Zheng Yuanjie to Three Trademarks" on Weibo, announcing that due to infringement issues, the monthly publication of "Fairy Tale King" would be closed in January 2022.
One month later, on December 15, he reposted Weibo again to reiterate the suspension.
Then, on Weibo released on the 20th, he also put forward six suggestions on trademark management: establishing a blacklist of maliciously registered trademarks, and all rights maintenance costs should be borne by infringers rather than successful trademark rights protection, etc.
When the interview phone was connected, Zheng Yuanjie was picking up his granddaughter from school, which was a state he hadn't had in the past many years.
"Because "The Fairy Tales" is a monthly magazine, it needs to be closed in the middle of each month. It has been very busy for so many years. I have been idle recently." According to the previous schedule (going to bed at 6:30 pm), he still had more than one after he hung up the phone. I'm going to rest at a young age, and recently, Zheng Yuanjie started to lose sleep.
According to Zheng Yuanjie, he has defended the rights of 3 trademarks for 32 years.
"I hope to use this method of suspending publication to arouse more people to pay attention to the protection of intellectual property rights in the trademark field." Zheng Yuanjie said in an interview with a reporter from China Business News.
On the 23rd, Zheng Yuanjie issued a Weibo stating that the Beijing Intellectual Property Court had issued a fair judgment on the infringement of the two trademarks "Pipilu" and "Suke".
Why is it so difficult to defend trademark rights?
"A total of 32 years of safeguarding rights for 3 trademarks", "only 16 successful rights safeguarding in 20 years", "there are still 672 trademarks on the way to safeguarding rights", Zheng Yuanjie cited some data to reporters.
As a monthly magazine that has been serialized for 36 years, "Fairy Tale King" has a large number of literary character names, which also makes Zheng Yuanjie a trademark rights fighter.
The three trademarks mentioned in the above letter are the Pipiru trademark No. 7197328 (trademark registration number, the same below), the Fairy Tale King trademark No. 8229932, and the Shuke trademark No. 5423972.
Zheng Yuanjie stated that he created Pipiru in 1981, Shu Ke in 1982, and founded the "Fairy Tale King" magazine in 1985.
The reporter searched on the official website of the Trademark Office of the State Intellectual Property Office and found that the trademarks of Shu Ke, Pipiru, and Fairy Tales were approved to be registered by others in 2009, 2010, and 2011, respectively.
Among them, "Pipiru" is registered as the 29th category of meat, dried meat and other products, and "Fairy Tale King" and "Shu Ke" are registered as the 25th category of clothing and suits.
Before that, Zheng Yuanjie had not registered these trademarks.
Therefore, it has also fallen into decades of trademark rights protection.
"my country's trademark management is a registration review system, with registration doctrine as the basic principle of trademark management. Unregistered trademarks are difficult to receive better protection." Yang Yong, a researcher at the Institute of Intellectual Property Law and Policy, East China University of Political Science and Law, told China Business News .
According to Article 32 of my country's Trademark Law, “applications for trademark registration shall not damage the existing prior rights of others”.
The Trademark Law also stipulates: "Within five years from the date of trademark registration, the prior right holder or interested party may request the Trademark Review and Adjudication Board to declare the registered trademark invalid."
That is to say, even if a maliciously registered trademark damages the existing prior rights of others, if the registration period has exceeded five years before the trademark invalidation application, the administrative agency and judicial agency cannot invoke the prior rights clause to declare The trademark is invalid.
This means that for trademarks registered for more than five years, Zheng Yuanjie had to invoke other clauses to file an application for trademark invalidation.
Liu Chunquan, a partner of Duan and Duan Law Firm, told China Business News that if someone has registered a trademark, it will take administrative procedures, which will take a long time.
“The trademark system determines that anyone who applies for a trademark must first file an application, and then the examiner of the Trademark Office will examine it. If it feels that there is no problem, it will pass.” He added, because the economy and society are constantly developing, the quality of trademarks is still There are actually censorship rules that are constantly changing, so there will be some differences.
Liu Chunquan explained that when defending trademark rights, it is necessary to file a trademark opposition to the Trademark Office, apply for cancellation of non-use of registered trademarks for three consecutive years, and declare invalidation of registered trademarks, etc., and enter administrative procedures.
After dissatisfied with the ruling issued by the Trademark Office, it has the right to bring a trademark administrative lawsuit to the corresponding court.
After dissatisfied with the first-instance judgment of the court, he has the right to appeal to the people's court at the next higher level.
The latest development is that these three trademarks are beginning to welcome good news.
In March 2020, the Trademark Review and Adjudication Agency ruled that the aforementioned "Pipilu" trademark registered by Zou can continue to be used.
Zheng Yuanjie sued the trademark review agency to the Beijing Intellectual Property Court.
On November 18 this year, the Beijing Intellectual Property Court issued its first-instance judgment, and Zheng Yuanjie won the case.
"The three trademark courts have all sentenced, or more accurately, there are two, that is,'Pipiru' and'Shu Ke'. The'Fairy Tale King' has not yet come to the court and is waiting for the State Trademark Review and Adjudication Board to declare invalid." He said .
Zheng Yuanjie told reporters that although the case was won, because the other party has already appealed, it is estimated that it will take about three years to completely end the dispute.
"If I complete all rights protection trademarks according to the current procedures, it should take 335 years."
Experts call for
Zheng Yuanjie's protection of these trademark rights is not an isolated case.
During the Olympics this year, some people maliciously registered the names of Olympic champions.
On August 19, the State Intellectual Property Office issued the "Notice on Rejecting 109 Trademark Registration Applications including "Yang Qian", "Chen Meng", and "Quan Hongchan" in accordance with the law. The names of Olympic athletes such as "Chen Meng" and "Quan Hongchan" and related hot words with specific meanings such as "Xing Ge" and "Tian Shen" were maliciously registered and submitted trademark registration applications in order to grab or improperly exploit the reputation of others in the market. Infringement of the rights of others’ names and their legal rights and interests has had a bad social impact.
In this regard, the State Intellectual Property Office condemned it, and in accordance with the provisions of Article 10, Paragraph 1, Item (8) of the Trademark Law, gave the "Yang Qian" No. 58130606, No. 58108579 "Chen Meng", and No. 58265645 "All 109 trademark registration applications (including one mark and multiple categories) including "Hongchan" were quickly rejected.
For this batch of rejected trademarks, the latest submission time was August 10, and the trademark office's rejection announcement time was August 19, which means that the shortest time from application to rejection took only 9 days.
During the epidemic, malicious squatting of trademarks also occurred frequently.
The announcement issued by the State Intellectual Property Office on February 27, 2020 stated: "The Trademark Office will severely crack down on malicious trademark registration applications related to the epidemic": The Trademark Office has increased the number of trademark registration applications related to the epidemic and prone to adverse effects. Control efforts, formulate the "Guiding Opinions on the Examination of Trademarks Related to Epidemic Prevention and Control" to clarify the names of persons involved in the epidemic, related signs including epidemic virus names, disease names, epidemic-related drug signs, protective product-related signs, and other epidemic-related signs, etc. instructions.
Control and control of nearly 1,000 trademark registration applications related to the new crown pneumonia epidemic, including "Vulcan Mountain" and "Leishen Mountain".
On March 4 and March 5, the Trademark Office intensively rejected a series of trademarks related to the epidemic such as "Li Wenliang" and "Huoshenshan".
The country has also stepped up its protection of intellectual property rights in recent years.
The "Opinions on Strengthening the Protection of Intellectual Property Rights" issued by the General Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the General Office of the State Council in 2019 proposed to speed up the revision and improvement of the Patent Law, the Trademark Law, and the Copyright Law, and greatly increase the upper limit of the legal compensation for infringement. Intensity of compensation for major damages.
In June 2020, the State Intellectual Property Office issued the "Guiding Opinions on Further Strengthening the Aid for Intellectual Property Rights Protection", which clearly realizes the national "one network" of intellectual property rights protection assistance services such as patents, trademarks, geographical indications, and integrated circuit layout designs. And other content.
In March 2021, the State Intellectual Property Office issued the "Special Action Plan for Combating Malicious Trademark Cybersquatting", and launched a nationwide special campaign to combat malicious trademark cybersquatting.
In the decision to amend the "Trademark Law" announced in April 2019, it was clear that the amount of compensation for malicious infringement of trademark exclusive rights was increased from less than three times before the revision to less than five times, and the statutory compensation limit was increased from 3 million yuan At 5 million yuan, the amount of punitive damages has reached a relatively high level in the world.
This year, the "Outline for Building a Powerful Country with Intellectual Property Rights (2021-2035)" and the "14th Five-Year Plan for the Protection and Application of Intellectual Property Rights" were announced. Specific measures have been put forward in terms of intellectual property legal policy system, strengthening judicial protection of intellectual property, strengthening administrative protection of intellectual property, strengthening coordinated protection of intellectual property, and strengthening protection of intellectual property source.
At the fourth-quarter regular press conference held by the State Intellectual Property Office on December 8, the relevant spokesperson said that since the beginning of this year, the State Intellectual Property Office has focused on high-quality development and launched a crackdown on abnormal patents that are not aimed at protecting innovation. The special rectification of applications and malicious squatting of trademarks has notified local governments of 4 batches of 815,000 irregular patent applications, with a withdrawal rate of 93.1% for the first three batches; and a total of 376,000 malicious trademark registration applications have been cracked down.
Liu Chunquan believes that because the trademark registration fee is not high, some trademark agency companies often apply in batches and will not control the trademark names applied by customers.
And some cybersquatters do take advantage of the hot spots, and they register trademarks that are homophonic and similar to well-known trademarks.
This has forced some right holders to build a "trademark moat" and register a bunch of trademarks.
Yang Yong suggested that due to the implementation of the trademark registration management system in my country, the United Kingdom and the United States implement a mixed management system of trademark registration and trademark use. They pay more attention to the trademark use system. Even if it is not registered as a trademark, it can still be effective as long as it can be proved that the previous use is used. protection of.
In the future, can we suggest that the government better integrate trademark registration with trademark use from the legislative perspective and management system of the trademark law?
In this way, you can avoid registering a bunch of malicious trademark registrations and then not using them.
At the same time, for right holders, their own rights need to be protected by themselves, because whether it is copyright, trademark or patent right, it is essentially a private right.
Right holders need to establish a set of strategies and methods for defending and protecting their own rights.
"Generally speaking, trademark disputes can be regulated under the trademark law and trademark registration management system. The existing legal system can be regulated, but it is more complicated. Therefore, right holders must pay attention to safeguarding their trademark rights. In addition to strengthening their own In addition to learning to actively defend rights, we also need to rely on professional teams to defend rights." Yang Yong reminded.
(Author: Jin Ye Zi)