Newsletter
CHINESE VERSIONS OF JAPANESE APPLICANTS' AND INVENTORS' NAMES
Under the Patent Law and its enforcement rules, the documents to be supplied when filing a pat-ent application must all be in Chinese. Hence when the applicant is a foreign national, Chinese translations of the names of the applicant and inventor should be provided to the IPO along with their other relevant details. In the past, in the case of some patent applications where the applicant or the inventor is Japanese, the Chinese version of the applicants' or inventors' name supplied to the IPO has not been entirely in tra-ditional (non-simplified) Chinese characters, but has included Japanese-style Chinese characters. This has affected the accuracy of the computer-ized data kept by the IPO. Hence on 6 July 2000 the IPO issued an announcement requiring ap-plicants to provide the names of Japanese ap-plicants and inventors in traditional Chinese characters; otherwise, in order to ensure the correctness of its data, the IPO will as necessary, put the names on file in traditional characters.