Chinese Trade Marks?

[Rubber Duck]

There has been a lot of talk about intellectual property rights in China and the abuse thereof. One of the persistent themes is that such matters are an Alien concept to the Chinese.

It appears to me that Chinese Language is very flexible and innovative, and rightly or wrongly, it appears to me that new terms can more or less be coined by mixing and matching Symbols. The other thing about Chinese is that there is no obvious punctuation within a sentence, notably spaces. It is there not readily clear where one word ends and the next starts, indeed apart from user experience there may be no real answer to that conundrum. It would therefore seem that just about any two character combination can be identified somewhere on Google in multiple independent incidences.

The concept of demonstrating first usuage of a coined combination of characters may therefore be meaningless. Perhaps, the Chinese just cannot cope with Trademarking, because the Iconic structure of their language makes such a concept unworkable!

I would be grateful for any imput from our Chinese Speakers on this one, as this is fundamental to the Domain Market in Chinese.

[touchring]

There has been a lot of talk about intellectual property rights in China and the abuse thereof. One of the persistent themes is that such matters are an Alien concept to the Chinese.

It appears to me that Chinese Language is very flexible and innovative, and rightly or wrongly, it appears to me that new terms can more or less be coined by mixing and matching Symbols. The other thing about Chinese is that there is no obvious punctuation within a sentence, notably spaces. It is there not readily clear where one word ends and the next starts, indeed apart from user experience there may be no real answer to that conundrum. It would therefore seem that just about any two character combination can be identified somewhere on Google in multiple independent incidences.

The concept of demonstrating first usuage of a coined combination of characters may therefore be meaningless. Perhaps, the Chinese just cannot cope with Trademarking, because the Iconic structure of their language makes such a concept unworkable!

I would be grateful for any imput from our Chinese Speakers on this one, as this is fundamental to the Domain Market in Chinese.


Trademarks are "nouns" and Chinese sentences are made up of nouns, adjectives and is/are/were (i forgot the name for these), so it's not difficult to separate nouns from the rest.

In any event, trademark infringement problem in China is more often on the logo than the word itself, since the English word itself is not used in China.

Here's the thread which i meant to be a joke to catch the unaware - http://www.idnforums.com/forums/381-starbucks-has-a-sinonized-logo-in-china%21-a.html?highlight=starbucks Seems that olney, ducky, and bill are all caught. :p