The Research On Prior Rights In Patent Law

As is put by Bacon, knowledge is power. With the development of science and technology and social economy, the types of intellectual products have increased day by day like mushrooms springing up. The protective scope of intellectual property rights have been enlarged, and the disputes of rights, contracts and infringements have become more and more complicated. Therefore, people in modern society enhance their consciousness of intellectual property rights gradually. In recent years, the conflicts of intellectual property rights have drawn widespread attention in academic and judicial circles. In the open market economic system at present, hitchhikers appear frequently. For example, some enterprises and proprietors will try to take advantage of legal loopholes instead of making use of counterfeit registered trademarks, patents or the rights of trade name in the past. Generally, the infringers counterfeit some parts or all of the intellectual products which have some popularity and core competence already, and legalize themselves by some specific administrative procedures, so that they can compete against the existing legitimate right, which is usually called special counterfeiting. In the patent field, especially the commercial value of design patent increases day by day, while the conflicts of design patent rights grow in great quantity recently. As a result, how to rationally balance the legitimate interests between patentee and the obligee of prior right, and how to handle the right conflicts have actually been focus issues at the level of legislative, enforcement and judicial protection.Intellectual property prior right is a right which is based on direct law prescription, and it is taken to protect personal benefits when the antecedent or former rights is getting violated or facing actual hazards of violation. In view of what have mentioned above, starting with the research background and significance of prior rights, some research statuses at home and abroad have been summarized and analyzed in the first part. Then system theory of prior right has been studied systematically, which includes its concepts, legal characters and comparison with some other legal terminology. In the third part of this thesis, the categories of design patent right and prior rights have been analyzed emphatically, which contains the prior registered trademark right, copyright, the right to use the specific decoration well-known commodities, the rights of trade name and the right of portrait of a natural person. Based on this, in order to further improve and develop prior right system, some fundamental principles and solutions to handle the right conflicts have been proposed in the last part of the thesis.