On The Legal Protection Of Geographical Indications In China

The geographical indication is used for indicating that a product has quality, reputation or other characteristics closely associated with specific geographic areas of the natural environment, humanity factors. Under the context of economic globalization, there are more and more opportunities for the geographical indication products entering to the international market. To every countries’ economy, geographic indications are gradually playing an important role to the international merchandise trade market.Therefore, the national laws carried out protection provisions to the geographical indications from different degrees, and formed the respective Geographical Indications Protection Legislation mode. At this stage, the protection to geographical indications in our country is mainly adopted in the parallel manner of "Trademark Law Protection" and specialized law protection of geographical indications, which has achieved some success on the Protection of Geographical Indications. But the coexistence of these two protection modes are also derived a series of drawbacks, caused chaos in China’s protection of geographical indications.Thereby it greatly reduced the efficiency of the protection of geographical indications, and the outstanding importance of geographical indications and the protection of Geographical Indications in the imperfect status quo showing is not commensurate with the situation. Therefore, we should work together to strengthen the protection to the geographical indications.This article discusses to improve the legal protection to geographical indications from three aspects of the legislative, judicial and law enforcement.The full text of the structure is divided into four parts:The first part gives a definition to the meaning of geographical indications and states the importance of the protection to the geographical indications.Firstly, this section mainly introduces the connotation of geographical indications, summarizes the characteristics of geographical indications, makes a distinction between the concept of geographical indications and other easy of confused.And then do an emphasis on the Private Right Attribute.The geographical indications are as well as the other intellectual property rights, its property exists the intangible characteristics; Secondly, this article makes a demonstration to the value of the protection of geographical indications,and concludes that the necessity and reality of the protection of geographical indications,and the effective protection of geographical indications can contribute to the China’s economic development.The second part mainly introduces the status of the protection to geographical indications in China and the focus of analysing the current existing problems in the legal protection to the geographical indications in China from the theoretical and practical aspects.This part makes an analyses to "Trademark Law", special law and other laws related to the protection of geographical indications from the perspective of the different nature of the law, and makes a conclusion to the provisions of the protection of geographical indications to these legal provisions in details, then sums up China’s the drawbacks of the geographical indication in the legal protection system.The third part mainly describes the legal protection of geographical indications abroad and international regulations, and makes an brief introduction to the several models of international protection of geographical indications, including the major international conventions and major countries of the typical protection mode. This section firstly introduced the protection system of geographical indications from the United States, France and Japan,and then make a brief evaluation to these several countries of the system of legal protection of geographical indications.They take the model in turns as follows:trademark law, special law, anti-Unfair Competition Law. Secondly, introducing the provisions of the protection to geographical indications in the TRIPS Agreement and the provisions of protection to geographical indications from the TRIPS Agreement includes the general protection, additional protection.And this agreement also made with the provisions of the exceptional protection of geographical indications.The fourth part proposes a few ideas for improving the legal protection to geographical indications in China, and giving suggestions about improving the legal protection to geographical indications in China from the perspective of the legislative, judicial, law enforcement and the like angles.This part first makes recommendations from the perspective of the improvement of legislation on the legal protection of geographical indications in China: China should end the legal protection of geographical indications chaos, drawing on the experience from foreign and international legal protection of geographical indications, select the specific legislation the protection of geographical indications and recommends the development of geographical indications specialized Protection Act;Secondly, to make recommendations for the improvement of the judicial protection of geographical indications, starting from the point of view of tort relief to improve the geographical indication, and respectively make recommendations to get improvements on these three aspects of civil remedies and criminal remedies, administrative remedies to provide judicial protection for the improvement of the legal protection of geographical indications; Finally, there are several suggestions to improve the enforcement of geographical indications, through the analysis of geographical indications of the Government’s request.The protections to the geographical indication from the Government is the important part to protect the geographical indication. The Government is required to change its functions to provide a high quality service for the geographical indication, and to protect and escort the geographical indication.This part major stresses the important role of geographical indication to protect Industry Association and provides some reference recommendations on the specification of geographical indications to protect the Industry Association.Striving to come up to improve our country’s geographical indication protection status quo, to enhance the level of protection to geographical indication in China, and to realize the ultimate goal of protecting our country’s geographical indications through the improvement of the protection of geographical indications in the three aspects of legislative, judicial,law enforcement.