Research On The Issues Of The Legal Protection Of Geographical Indications

The 1st clause of the 22nd term of TRIPS agreement prescribes: the geographical indications in this agreement have the following meanings: it marks that some commodity come from some member's home district, or from some place or some area of that district. The specified quality, reputation or other features are mainly related to the district (clause 1, term 22, Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, Including Trade in Counterfeit Goods, translated by professor Zheng Cheng-si).The geographical Indications is one of the seven types of intellectual property prescribed in TRIPS agreement, is a kind of invisible asset." The geographical Indications might be one of the 'advantages' of the intellectual property in our country, not like the patent, resound brand and so on, which will be our disadvantages for a long time. Our country has a long history of 5000 years. Our country is rich in many famous excellent speciacl productions, for example: agricultural products, handicrafts and so on, these commodity have got good reputation in the international exchange, and fully conform to the prescription related to the geographical indications in the TRIPS agreement.The geographical indications system has been established for more than one hundred years. The current protection model that the countries in the world have are: the protection model of anti-unfair competition to law, the protection model of specialized legislation, the protection model of trademark law. The different models think about how to obtain more economic benefit for its own country from its own position.This paper is divided into four parts to make research on this topic. Part one is about the basic theory of the geographical indications, including the comparison between the geographical indications and the related concepts, the features of the geographical indications, the legal property of the geographical indications. Part two is about the international protection and comment and analysis of the geographical indications. 《Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property》, 《the Madrid Agreement for the Protection of False or Deceptive Indication of Source on Goods》, 《the Lisbon Agreement for the Protection of Appellations of Origin and their International Registration》 are mainly analyzed in this part. Part three is the discussion about the protection model to the geographical indications .Part four is the suggestion to the China geographical indications protection system.