Study On Conditions For The Grant Of Design Patent Rights

With further development of knowledge economy and economic globalization, intellectual property is increasingly becoming strategic resource for national development and the core elements of international competitiveness, to become an important support of building an innovation-oriented country and the key to grasp the development initiative. Designs are an important part of intellectual property rights. According to the estimates of Industrial Designers Society of America, if you put 1 U.S. dollars in the industrial design, you can bring the proceeds of 1500 U.S. dollars. Therefore, to Strengthen the protection of the design is of great significance.Design patent protection involves lots of contents, one of the most important thing are conditions for the grant of design patent rights. Because the designs are implemented in a preliminary review and adopted a lower standard called novelty standards according to China's current Patent Law, our design patent applications are of large quantity but of low quality, there is a big gap compared to the United States, Japan, and other patent power, and it has also become a major faulted to the public.The decision on amending the Patent Law of People's Republic of China adopted at the sixth meeting of the Standing Committee of the Eleventh National People's Congress on December 27, 2008. The amended Patent Law shall go into effect on October 1, 2009. the new Patent Law has modified the conditions for the grant of design patent right, which will undoubtedly contribute to improve the quality of design patents of our country.In this paper, the writer try to investigate the modification, the reasons for change and the application after amended of the conditions for granting design patent rights based on the Amendment of the Patent Law for the third time. The paper is consists of Introduction, principal parts and conclusion.The principal parts are divided into three sections. The first section introduces the modification of the conditions for granting design patent right. The modifications are involving four aspects: Limits the scope of the design patents, enhances the standards of granting designs patent rights, permits the applications of related design, submit design patent applications with brief description. Then the section focuses on the Article 23 of the new Patent Law. The writer reviews the meaning of existing technology, the absolute novelty standard, inconsistent application and the importance of originality, in order to emphasis the importance of improving the authorized standards.The second section studies the driving forces to amend the conditions for granting design patent rights law. This section discusses the status of protecting design patents in our country, the main issues of conditions for granting design patents rights and the protection of design patent abroad. Then the writer describes the low grantting standards, a serious situation of duplicate granted, non-uniform of the examination standards in detail through three cases and pointed out that we must amend the Patent Law in order to change this situation.The third section analysises some questions about the appliance of granting conditions of design patents after the new Patent Law goes into effect. This section propose the problems that may be encountered in applicable legal questions, such as the appliance of absolute novelty and inconsistent application, the person who determines whether or not the design patent existence originality, the scope of the existing design as a contrast paper, the review of originality, to deal with rights conflict and the impact of the infringement. At last the writer tries to propose the views and measures.