On The Legal Protection Of Geographical Indications

The legal protection of geographical indications is one of the main elements of a new round of negotiations of WTO. It is not only one of the hot research of international intellectual property community, but also one of the hot and difficult problems in domestic intellectual property protection, and it also has got widspread concern and attention. The concept which is related to the geographical origin of goods have country of origin, certificates of origin, indications of source, appellations of origin, geographical indications, etc.Geographical indications are indicators which show a certain product from a someplace, the given quality, reputation or other characteristics, all of these is determined by the region's natural factors or human factors. Domestic scholars has not yet reached a consensus on characteristics of geographical indications, and this essay talks about four characteristics of geographical indications. Domestic scholars did not define the concept of geographical indication from the front side, and there are different points of view about the characteristics of geographical indications. This artical argues that geographical indication means the legal persons or other organizations have right according to their geographical indications. There are two characteristics in geographical indications. Geographical indications as a kind of property, it should belong to the people within the country of origin, that is to say , it is not a public property, but the collective property.The Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, The Madrid Agreement for the Repression of False or Deceptive Indications of Source on Goods, The Lisbon Agreement for the Protection of Appellations of Origin and their International Registration Artical and The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, all of these have the rules about the protection of geographical indications. France, Germany, the United States and other major Western countries have established their own system of protection of geographical indications. At present, there are five legislative models about the system of protection of geographical indications in the major Western countries.At present, we not only use Trademark Legal System, but also Geographical Indications Protection System and Protection system of geographical indications of agricultural products to protect the geographical indications. The main problems of our country's protection of geographical indications system is :the current system of protection is unscientific; Legal terminology is not unified; Geographical indications and vesting of property rights law is not clear; the contents of geographical indications is not perfect; the system of prior rights is not adequate. In order to further improve our country's system of protection of geographical indications, we should choose the scientific legislative model ,unified legal language, definite the ownership and the concept of geographical indications, indications, perfect the system of prior rights.