Parallel Imports Of Patented Products

According to the Article69of the2008Patent Law, China allows the parallelimportation of patented products. The TRIPs Agreement doesn’t provide whether parallelimports are legal or not, and leaves it to be decided by the member countries’ owndomestic law. In practice, the countries’ attitudes to parallel importation of patentedproducts usually depend on their economic interests and trade policies, and thus thejudicial practices are quite different from country to country. The permission to parallelimports of China has its pros and cons, and thereby China was threatened by developedcountries through diplomatic channels or trade methods. To address this issue, beginningwith researching legal theories and judicial practices of parallel imports, this paper studiespractical experiences of regional exhaustion of patented products in European Union, andanalyses the formation process of "the Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement andPublic Health”, and discusses the feasibility of enforcement of regional exhaustion ofpatented products in China-ASEAN free trade zone, and gives the opinion that Chinashould clarify the flexible terms of TRIPs with other developing countries, promotingenforcement of exhaustion of patent right in a worldwide scope. Whether to allow parallelimports is not just an intellectual property issue, but rather an issue relates to country’seconomic interests and trade policy. From the perspectives of interested subjects in market,this paper analyses the negative effect of China’s permission to parallel imports, andproposes the preventive solutions. It wishes that our country can benefit from this researchto improve the capability of science and technology and develop social and economiclevel.