Joint Invention in Technology Industry.　The Fair Trade Committee Planned to Lift the Ban.

The Fair Trade Committee points out, in the trend of globalization, corporations enhancing their competitiveness in the international market through joint venture, strategy alliance and etc. has become a corporations’ model of profit-seeking operation.  As a result, the Fair Trade Committee plans to lift the ban on joint action allowing the technology corporations to jointly develop, share and research on a new invention based on precedents of American Laws’ Anti-Trust Law as well as European Union’s block exemption regulation.

 

According to the current Fair Trade Law, corporations are denied of joint action.  However, the following situations that are beneficial to public interests are not under the restriction of joint action, such as improving quality, uniting shapes and forms in order for the corporations to lower their costs; jointly developing products or market so as to ameliorate skills and refine quality; taking on the same action toward the importing of merchandise overseas to strengthen the trading effect.

 

To enable technology corporations’ integration with the upstream and downstream channels to jointly develop and share the result of development, the Fair Trade Committee plans to amend supplementary Item 8, Paragraph 14 of the Fair Trade Law allowing the technology corporations to develop fundamental skills by means of joint action.  Based on the said amendment, joint actions made to boost development of the industries, improve sales or manufacturing and benefit the economy and public interests may be applied to the Fair Trade Committee for exceptional permission.

 

The time of knowledge economy has arrived.  Most industries have to go through technology upgrade to be able to uplift their operation advantages, especially in Taiwan, the medium-small enterprises account for 98% of the total number of enterprisers.  It is through joint development of skills can they effectively lower the research cost. (2005.1)

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