Newsletter
NEW PRACTICE ON EXAMINATION OF SIMILARITY BETWEEN CHINESE MARKS
The practice for trademark authority to examine similarity between Chinese character trademarks written horizontally has always been conducted in two directions - from right to left and from left to right. The Intellectual Property Office recently has revised its practice as follows:
Trademarks composed solely of Chinese characters will still be examined by the two methods of reading - from right to left and from left to right.
Trademarks composed of Chinese characters and foreign language characters or devices, where there is no direct relationship between the Chinese characters and foreign language characters or devices' will still have the Chinese characters examined in the two methods of reading as explained above.
Trademarks composed of Chinese characters and foreign language characters or devices where there is a direct relationship between the Chinese characters and foreign language characters or devices, will have the Chinese characters examined only in one direction according to the meaning of the entire trademark. Examples of this are when the Chinese characters are a transliteration or translation of the foreign language characters of the trademark or when they represent the same conceptual meaning of a device.