Foreign Filing Licenses for Patents in China

WRITTEN BY TOBY MAK

China introduced requirements for foreign-filing licences for inventions in 2010 (when the third revision of the Patent Law came into force). It has become increasingly common for an invention to involve research teams in China and at least one foreign country. Multinational companies need to be aware that compliance with the foreign-filing licence requirements may become an issue – potentially aff ecting the validity of a corresponding Chinese patent.

Like the US, China has its foreign-filing licence requirement for inventions. This was introduced in 2010 when the third revision of the Chinese Patent Law came into force. In my view, this was reasonable, as China has more and more inventions, and some of these could be related to national security. Various other countries have similar measures (according to www.wipo.int/pct/en/texts/nat_sec.html, in addition to the US, there are 28 countries with domestic law requirements similar to the US foreign filing licence, including China, India, France, Germany, Spain, Malaysia, Vietnam). So China having the same should be expected.

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This article was written by our IP Expert Toby Mak and originally published in the CIPA Journal.