Trademark Law Violation Occurs at a High Frequency of Four Infringements Per Day. TIPO Manages to Specify Patterns of Trademark Infringement.

In the annual trademark seminar held by the TIPO in the end of 2006, the deputy director-general of TIPO, Ms. Wang Mei-Hua (王美花) indicated that the current Taiwan Trademark Law provides insufficient provisions to resolve trademark infringement disputes and it is necessary to propose an amendment thereof to clearly define trademark fair use and specify infringement patterns.

The judge from Taipei District Court revealed in the seminar that there are indeed considerable disputes arising from trademark use and every district court had received a total of 1526 cases of Trademark Law violation in 2005, which doubles the 723 cases in 2002.  Particularly, the act of use and the act of sale in connection with a registered trademark is held legally different.  The judge has to depend on the facts/evidence taken in every case, instead of a general rule, and exercise his/her discretion to determine what really constitutes the circumstance of “fair use” and “confusion” of a registered trademark.

The offense of selling or importing counterfeits of branded products is most common in trademark infringement, among which the acts of selling counterfeit tobacco/alcohol products, pirating disks, and counterfeiting designated trash bags, printing/using CAS mark without authorization, refilling and the recycled bottles that bear famous marks, and using three-dimensional shape of a two-dimensional trademark constitute the most controversial types of trademark use.  (2006.11)

/CCS