Legal Protection Of Geographical Indications

Geographical indications is a special type of intellectual property, which reflects the relationship between geographical environment and product, indicating a certain quality and credibility of product. It’s valued by countries because of the enormous economic benefits and the function of culture inheriting in it. TRIPs has opened a new age of protecting intellectual property by geographical indications since treating geographical indications as an independent type of intellectual property. These geographical indications constitutes a important part of export in China, which possesses long history and culture, vast territory and abundant resources, a large number of featured products, extraordinary ample resources of geographical indications. Hence it can be a sally by protecting the geographical indications, which can open up international trade and improve the competitive situation of export. However, there are still many problems in legislation and in practice for the protection of geographical indications in China. Therefore the study of the protection of geographical indications has so much significance to our country.This paper consists the preface, text and endnotes.The text includes four parts: respectively for the concept of geographical indications, the rational analysis of the geographical indications protection in our country, the current situation and existing problems in our country, the idea of the reconstruction of geographical indications.The first part is based on TRIPS article22in paragraph1and article16of the trademark law, analysing the concept of geographical indications and discriminating the geographical indications with related concept, clarifying the relationship between the geographical indications and indication of source, appellation of origin, trademark.The second part mainly discusses the current situation and existing problems of the protection against geographical indications. Firstly, it reviews the history of our country about the geographical indications protection; Secondly, it introduces the geographical indications protection in the present legislation and respectively analyses the trademark law and special law pattern on the mode of geographical indications protection; Finally, it reveals the problems which exists in the geographical indications protection of our country and analyses the reason of the problems.The third part is mainly to put forward the idea of rebuilding our geographical indications protection system which is the key part in this paper. Firstly it proposes that it is suitable for national conditions in china that geographical indications should be protected by the mode of trademark law, and analyses the reasons. And then it makes proposals for revising China’s trademark law.