Applications increase

China filed a record number of international patent applications in 2005 and emerged as the world's 10th largest user of the Patent Co-operation Treaty (PCT), according to a report by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

The country filed 2,452 international patent applications last year, an increase of 43.7 per cent from 1,706 in 2004. This rapid growth helped China overtake Canada, Italy and Australia as the 10th largest PCT user.

WIPO Deputy Director-General Francis Gurry, who oversees the work of the PCT, said that the most impressive growth came from northeast Asia, particularly Japan, South Korea and China, which together accounted for 24.1 per cent of all international patent applications.

"Growth in (the region) continues to be exceptional," Gurry said. "It reflects the rapidly growing technological strength of those countries."

Since 2000, patent applications have risen 162 per cent in Japan, 200 per cent in South Korea and 212 per cent in China.

Industry authorization

New online music website TOP100.CN is the first Chinese website to provide music downloads authorized by major international record companies.

Over the past three years, TOP100.CN has negotiated support and approval from SONY, EMI and Columbia Records to sell their songs on the Internet.

The support of the international record industry demonstrates the progress China has made in the struggle to protect intellectual property rights (IPR), said Chen Ge, TOP100.CN's chief executive officer.

The Chinese Government recently closed 76 websites in a three-month campaign against IPR violators, many of which were online music shops.

BitTorrent protected

Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent, the highly popular peer-to-peer software programme that facilitates the exchange of large music and movie files, will take steps to fight against what he says is abuse of its name.

For the past few years, software developers have been using BitTorrent technology free of charge under an open-source software licence. This led to the sudden appearance of software titles claiming to be compatible with BitTorrent downloads.

The programme's high speed and reliability have made it one of the most popular ways online to illegally copy and share movies, software, music and games.

Cohen's new company is an attempt to register a legal online movie distributor under the BitTorrent name. The company will soon begin enforcing the trademark, and those using the BitTorrent trademark to market other products will have to pay a nominal fee to the company.

Patent expiry

Pharmaceutical patents worth US$23 billion will expire in 2006, according to China's Ministry of Public Health.

The loss of legal protection will pose a challenge to the owners of the patents, but will also provide opportunities for a number of domestic small and mid-sized firms that can't afford high development costs for new products.

Six of the patents are for widely known medicines manufactured by famous international pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer Inc and Merck Sharp & Dohme Ltd.

Top 10 list

The United States Patent and Trademark Office has announced the top 10 global private sector patent recipients of 2005. IBM topped the list with 2,941 patents in its 13th consecutive year at the top.

IBM was followed by Canon Kabushiki Kaisha, Hewlett-Packard Development Co, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co, Ltd, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, Micron Technology Inc, Intel Corp, Hitachi Ltd, Toshiba Corp and Fujitsu Ltd.

Of the ten companies on the list, half were Japanese, four from the United States and one from South Korea.

(China Daily 02/21/2006 page9)