On The Abuse Of Trademark Rights And Its Legal Regulation

Trademark is a sign that helps to distinguish goods and services between different providers,and by which people can know better the goods and services. Nowadays,as competition becomes cut-throat,trademark is playing a more and more important role,and has become a part of intangible assets of enterprises. An accepted trademark can bring enterprise with tremendous economic interests. As trademark plays an increasingly important role in the market,people always exploit their trademarks as much as possible.In the process,trademarks are sometimes used to obtain improper interests,which go against the nature of trademarks.The history of real protection of intellectual property right in China is merely no more than 20 years.It will take some time to improve the system of intellectual property right protection,and to impress upon people the importance of intellectual property protection.At the initial stage of market economy in our country,there were lots of counterfeit trademark goods,and people didn't realize the importance of trademark protection.So it was imperative to raise the sense of trademark protection,in order to safeguard healthy order of market economy.But,as competition becoming more and more fierce,especially after entering WTO,there are some new problems emerging, and merely offering protection to trademarks is not enough.Sometimes trademarks are abused as a tool to obtain improper interests,breaking the balance of interests between the owners of trademarks,their competitors and the public,having harmful effects on market economy.In practice,the abuse of trademarks has many forms,mainly including hampering others' fair use,hampering former users from continuing using trademarks,running counter to exhaustion of the registered mark,reverse domain name hijacking,anti-competition license and so on.As competition in the market become more cut-throat,their will be more and more new ways of abusing trademarks,which makes it difficult to systematically summarize their forms.So,it is necessary to analyze and summarize this phenomenon generally. The abuse of trademarks has many reasons:political reasons,economical reasons,and legal reasons;as well as some specific reasons in our country.It deals with not only the excise of trademark rights,but also the imperfection of related legal structures.Faced with these problems,we should attach more importance to it and work out related provisions to prevent the abuse of trademarks.The abuse of trademarks injures not only the interests of competitors,but also the interests of consumers:damages not only competitive order,but also public interests.We should be vigilant that some multinational corporations are using their trademarks as a tool to strangle the development of domestic industries.This manifests that this problem is worth placing importance to.Only by improving related legal provisions can we achieve the objective of trademark laws.The function of private laws is limited,thus only laws in the field of civil law are not competent to combat the abuse of trademarks effectively and sufficiently,which makes competition laws indispensable.On the one hand,we should set out necessary limitations of trademark rights,ruling out the rights harmful to the market.Also,we should use some abstract provisions,such as the basic principles of civil law to combat the abase of trademarks effectively.On the other hand,considering the limitations of private laws in itself,it is imperative for us to establish and improve related competition laws,using other nations' successful experiences for reference.With the provisions of competition laws,the problem of abuse of trademarks would be solved better.This thesis starts from the definition of the abuse of trademark rights,then generalize the characteristics from these typical phenomenon.Then this thesis analyzes the reasons for it and importance of combating the abuse of trademark rights,then finally provides some suggestions.Besides introduction and conclusion,this thesis can be divided into four parts.In the first part,the overview of the abuse of trademark rights.Starting from the definition of trademark,the thesis then analyze the functions and the importance of trademark in the market.With the development of trademarks,the thesis then introduces the phenomenon of abusing trademark rights.In the second part,this thesis lists some typical kinds of abuse of trademark rights in the market,and analyzes their damages.In the third part,theoretical analyze of abuse of trademark rights.This thesis defines the abuse of trademark rights,analyze the requisites to constitute abuse of trademark rights,its reasons,and finally the importance of dealing with it.In the forth part,some suggestions about legal provisions to combat the abuse of trademark rights.Only civil law provisions are not competent to solve the problem,which makes other laws outside the scope of civil law necessary.