On The Legal Protection Of Geographical Indications And The Choice Of China

Since the Agreement On Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (Hereinafter referred to as TRIPS) formulated by The World Trade Organization (Hereinafter referred to as WTO) formally listed Geographical Indications (Hereinafter referred to as GIs) as an independent intellectual property right type for the first time, legal protection of GIs became an international central issue among many law researchers in both the domestic and international academic circles. GIs protected as one kind of the intellectual property rights is not an innovation coming from TRIPS. More than one hundred years ago, Paris Convention on the Protection of Industrial Property (Hereinafter referred to as Paris Convention) has proposed the protection of Original Production Place Nam, the title from which the appellation of GIs is evolved.With the continuous development of economic globalization, the protection of GIs is getting increasing attention by the world. Because of the relatively short history of protection of GIs, research on GIs in China has just started. Currently there exist many imperfections in the domestic legislation of the protection of GIs, so this article is attempting to put the legal protection of GIs and the choice of China as a research topic.This paper briefly describes the system overview of protection of GIs, on this basis combining with the historical evolution of GIs protection system, further discusses the existing pattern of the protection of GIs and the new developments in the international protection of GIs, then combining with China's national conditions specifically analyzes the current problems in our protection of GIs, and finally proposes improving countermeasures against the protection of China's GIs. Specifically, the body of this article is divided into five parts.The first part, combining with the definition of GIs in relevant international conventions and domestic legislation of many countries in the world, analyzes the concept and meaning of GIs, the main legal features of GIs as well as the discriminations among GIs and the other related concepts. The second part concretely analyzes the protecting historical evolution of GIs, including the International conventions on the protection of GIs before the TRIPS Agreement and the TRIPS Agreement on the protection of GIs, also including the national laws of major European countries, the New World countries and some other countries on the protection of GIs.The third part discusses the current protection mode of GIs, including the special legislation protection mode, the trademark protection mode, the unfair competition law protection mode and the mixed legislation protection mode. By analyzing the characteristics of the four different protection modes, the author brings forward several reference significances to China.The fourth part discusses the new developments in the international protection of GIs, mainly in allusion to the GIs multilateral notification and the registration system, and also in allusion to the expanding protection of GIs and the recently existing disputes.The fifth part analyzes the present situation of protection of our country's GIs, on this basis, reveals the problems in the recent protection of GIs, and fatherly puts forward some related countermeasures in order to improving the protection of GIs.