Ms. Haiyu Li and Ms. Jia Li, both partners at CHOFN IP (China) were kind enough to visit our firm today. They introduced their firm and provided us with more details about the potential changes being considered as the 5th Revision to the Chinese Trademark Law.

Ms. Qui Geng, trademark attorney and partner at Linda Lui & Partners (Shanghai) visited us today and shared with us her thoughts on the fine points of the 5th Revision to the Chinese Trademark Law that is currently under deliberation. She also shared with us some of the more unconventional and innovative steps that can be taken in China to improve the chances of registration as well as the benefits and challenges involved. Ms. Geng also gave us some interesting and valuable insight on steps being taken and considered by the TMO with respect to applications filed by third parties in bad faith. She mentioned that the number of Chinese companies interested in filing in Japan has increased considerably, so we took this opportunity to provide our insight on things to keep in mind when filing applications with the JPO. The small discrepancies between our two country’s systems and the relative work-arounds were interesting to discuss.

Today we had the pleasure of hosting Ms. Patricia Kaim from Von Wobeser y Sierra (Mexico). Being one of the largest full-service law firms in Mexico, Von Wobeser y Sierra also provides a considerable number of IP-related services, including trademark cases, and also have an impressive track record in contractual law. Ms. Kaim explained to us some of the political aspects of administration and inner workings of the Mexican TMO, and how this affects trademark application and registration.

Ms. Jiang Ling and Ms. Vivian Yang were kind enough to visit our office this week. They updated us on the upcoming revisions to the Trademark Law in China that are now under consideration. They also provided us with the recent specifics on how the similarity of word marks are being evaluated as well as rejections regarding marks that are considered to be potentially misleading with respect to the quality/content of the goods. We had some questions about how the TMO in China makes and handles similarity judgements with respect to both the titles of books and publications and also device marks (depictions and of characters, likenesses etc.), to which Ms. Ling and Ms. Yang provided concise and informative answers.

Mr. Jeong Ho Shin and Mr. Chang Oh Ryu from the firm of Kim & Chang (Korea) visited our office. We discussed the Korean Trademark Office’s recent adoption of a partial refusal system, as well as their newly implemented re-examination policy and expedited examination procedure. Mr. Shin and Mr. Ryu also provided us with the details about what revisions to the IP law in Korea are currently being considered. Another topic they informed us about was how goods and services related to the “metaverse” should be described, and how similarity of these types of goods are evaluated, which was both enlightening and quite interesting.