On The Macro-protection Of Public Interest To Intellectual Property By Anti-unfair Competition Law

According to the classification of law by Continental Law System, the law protecting public interest is called Public Law, and the law protecting private interest is called Private Law. Intellectual law mainly protects intellectual property from the view of Private Law, while anti-unfair competition law protects intellectual property mainly from the view of Public Law. Since the private interest protected by intellectual law and the public interest protected by anti-unfair competition law usually rely on each other, which decides that these two laws have the common value orientation, these two laws represent something with intercommunity. As a result, it is inevitable that anti-unfair competition law as a public law protect the private right of intellectual property.During historic evolvement, intellectual law has been developed into a Private Right from a Privilege to encourage innovation. However, the legislation module of separate law and its focus on the right itself of intellectual property decides its limitation on the protection of private interest. These limitations are its lack of complete protection of new patterns of intellectual property, lack of coordination among various kinds of intellectual property, and insufficient attention to social macro interest.While the anti-unfair competition law stands on the high level of social macro interest with the aim to maintain fair competition system and commercial ethics of honesty and fairness. In the field of intellectual property, its comparative uncertainty broadens the space of completely protection of intellectual property. Its introduction of the principle of honesty and fairness as its standards to judge the justness of behavior is in favor of coordination among intellectual property. As a public law, its focus on the social macro interest will provide right guidance to the competition in the field of intellectual property. Anti-unfair competition law of our country provides intellectual property protection in the three aspects as prohibition against imitation, resolving conflict among intellectual property and protection of secret information.However, anti-unfair competition law in our country has much to be improved to exert its macro-protection on public interest of intellectual property. Comparing the legislation of foreign countries and international treaties, we need to improve our anti-unfair competition legislation in the following three aspects to protect intellectual property properly. At first, it is strongly recommended to stipulate definitely in this law about the unregistered trademark. Secondly, we suggest to add general terms to break the limitation of unfair competition definition in order to solve the conflict among intellectual properties. Finally, it is suggested to broaden the application scope of anti-unfair competition law, which means competition relationship shall not become the application premise of this law, and subject governed by this law shall not limited to business operators, to involve more new patterns of intellectual properties into the protection.After complete study of both intellectual property law and anti-unfair competition law, we can get the conclusion that anti-unfair competition law provides not only supplementary protection of intellectual property. It is more significant that the anti-unfair competition law provides necessary adjustment and rectification on the base of social macro interest. With the assistance of intellectual property law, anti-unfair competition law will guide the competition in the field of intellectual property into a more healthy and harmonious direction.