On The Legal Protection For The Trademark In The Electronic Commercial Environment

The development and widespread usage of internet technology promote the development of the information dissemination and economic enhancement, and provide a new chance for the exploitation and the transmission of intellectual property right. However , internet has the characteristics with globality, timeliness and interactivity which bring about challenges and impulses to the original legal principles, especially in the realm of infringement of intellectual property, which deliver a new topic on the protection for the trademark. The paper analyzes and discusses the problem under the aforesaid background in order to make deep researches for the protection for trademark in the electronic commercial environment.This paper adopts the structure of advance by degrees, including five parts altogether. The first part states the source and fundamental features of trademark infringement in the electronic commerce; the second part states electronic commerce and legal environment, including the present legislation of e-commerce; the third part exemplifies the infringement of trademark of the e-commerce and its regulations; the fourth part analyzes the formation and laws of trademark protection suitable to the e-business. The fifth part is the conclusion of this paper.The following part summarizes the main idea of this paper. This paper thinks that electronic commerce is an extensive definition of application field, including various business activities and relevant affairs, the extension of which covers production, sale, service and related activities, even including the administration activities and business process of internal enterprises. This paper mainly makes the research for protection for trademark in the electronic commercial environment on the basis of internet.In comparison with traditional trademark infringement, the infringement of trademark of electronic commerce has characteristics with infringement object invisibility, uncertainty of infringement location, which not only arouse new changes in the infringement means, but also incur a series of problems ranging from the standard of infringement on the trademark exploitation in the realm of electronic business, judicial jurisdiction of trademark infringement to calculation of infringement indemnification , which are different from the traditional one. The type of trademark infringement in the electronic business environment such as registration in bad faith or the domain name same or similar to the well-known trademark incurring the confusion about the source of trademark on the product or service is only the extension of traditional trademark in the electronic commerce, which is uniform in essence. And therefore, the cognizance of trademark infringement in the electronic business environment shall follow the same principle as the traditional one.This paper thinks that there are no radical differences between the electronic business trademark infringement and a traditional one on the criterion upon the confusion or mistaken identification. We should take the similarity of trademark and product and service into consideration. However we may not consider the similarity of trademark or service and product as the identification criterion of infringement. Even if this cannot conform to the requirements of"similarity"or"analogy"on some certain occasion, it can make infringement as well, which is determined by the aim of realizing main function of trademark. The above-mentioned point of view is the theoretical innovation of this paper. At the main time, prohibition of"possibility of confusion"is the nuclear problem. The so-called"confusion prior to the sales", namely it may arouse confusions at the very beginning but is not confused when seeing the realities. The theory is very essential for the prohibition of internet infringement, and is the basis of circumscribing trademark rights scope. With regard to the"confusion possibility", we shall base on the realities of market connecting with the significance of trademark to identify.