Research On The Legal Protection Problems Of Intellectual Property Rights In Chinese Overseas Investment

With Chinese continuous development of social economy in recent years, the scale and area of overseas investment and cooperation have expanded rapidly. More and more Chinese enterprises begin to enter into the international stage gradually to open up their overseas markets. However, while these companies rush to the overseas markets, they repeatedly suffer intellectual property litigation from foreign enterprises or individuals, which not only affects enterprises’ overseas markets, but also smears enterprises’ international reputation, and it hinders Chinese economic development. Reflection on the existing problems:enterprises hold the negative attitude in the protection of overseas intellectual property rights, and they have poor awareness of overseas intellectual property management; government departments lack the relevant legislation, law enforcement, and warning; the effect of industry association in overseas intellectual property protection also has not been in full use of currently.Nowadays, among those developed countries where Chinese overseas investment flows more, the United States and the European Union are the most representative in intellectual property protection. In America the relevant laws and regulations, and the relief system are very complete. Moreover American punishment standard and the infringement cost are very high. European intellectual property law system can be divided into two levels:the European and its member states’, and at the same time its relevant law enforcement standard is also very strict. In addition, Chinese current foreign investment mainly flows to developing countries, and the investment amount to ASEAN is large and growing rapidly. But most ASEAN countries are still in the preliminary stage of economic development whose intellectual property legal system is relatively defective, and the ASEAN’s integration of intellectual property law is more difficult because the provisions among the member states also differ from each other.Looking into the international level, the system of international intellectual property protection is also undergoing a big test. Represented by multilateral agreements such as ACTA, TPP, TTIP and so on, the development of international intellectual property protection is showing that:the combination led by developed countries, regional multilateral negotiations tend, emphasis on enforcement of intellectual property, emphasis on the treatment of network infringement and so on. These new multilateral intellectual property rules will likely weaken the existing WTO, WIPO and other international intellectual property protection system. So the received interests of emerging economies benefiting from the existing legal system including China will also be greatly affected, and Chinese overseas investment may also meet with immeasurable negative effects. However, in the optimistic view, these new changes may also enable our country to re-examine the relevant domestic legal system where China may study countermeasures and seek opportunities.Faced with these realistic and urgent issues, it has become a top priority in the overseas investment to improve intellectual property protection system that how to respond and regulate. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct a research on the issues presented from the intellectual property protection in Chinese current foreign investment, and it is also necessary to combine with the countries’ intellectual property legal system where Chinese overseas investment mainly flows, in order to try to separately find some improvement suggestions and escort for the development of Chinese overseas investment process from three aspects of the government, enterprises, and industry associations.