Intellectual Property Department - What is Intellectual Property?

Presentation by Stephen SELBY
Director of Intellectual Property , Hong Kong SAR Government

Agents and legal practitioners representing applicants for registration of IP rights;
Professionals who need to use of obtain licenses for IP; and
Examiners in Government registration officers who have to examine and approve applications to register IP rights;

Today there is a rich resource for all types of users on the INTERNET. I shall try to introduce some of them here. Sometimes I shall refer to websites that are commercial. Of course, I have no financial interest in doing so, and anything I say cannot be regarded as an endorsement of any particular sites.

The sorts of practitioners I mentioned just now are mainly professionals. None of you needs a general introduction to intellectual property. But most of us have expertise restricted to one or two jurisdictions and we should not disdain general material made available by IP resources that give us a quick glimpse into the general IP protection regime in a jurisdiction outside our own.

If you are looking for a quick window into IP protection in the EU Member States, a very good site is http://www.cordis.lu/ipr-helpdesk/ This is the side of the Enterprise Directorate General of the EU.

For the US, there are of course many government sites with general guides. You might also be interested to look up http://www.itsabout.com/ which is a commercial website by a US company called 'Patent Cafe .com'.

The classic site for Australian general IP information is http://www.ipaustralia.gov.au/.

China has a valuable resource on the Web in English at http://www.sipo.gov.cn/e-page.htm.

Within the site is an introduction to other industrial rights protection in Japan at http://www.jpo-miti.go.jp/shoukaie/tgaiyoe.htm .

Through the sites mentioned above you can find links to the sites of Government patent agencies almost anywhere in the world. Strangely, it is often not easy to find overt links to trade mark offices. They always seem to be treated as poor second cousins of patent offices.

Patent search on the INTERNET is now well established, although in some cases, a fee is required. What we often need in addition to patent information, whether it is in relation to trademarks or patents, are dictionaries or other resources for new technologies.

For computing and the INTERNET, a useful resource is the 'webopedia' at http://www.pcwebopedia.com/ supplied through internet.com Corporation in the USA. Another site that specializes in explaining IT-related terminology is http://www.whatis.com/ supplied by TechTarget.com in the USA. 7. Sometimes the reverse process occurs: an innocent individual obtains a domain name (perhaps his own surname) for a bona-fide trading purpose and is then threatened with legal action by a large company who believes the innocent domain name is against its interest. This situation is called 'reverse hijacking'.

For general science, you can look up the archives of New Scientist Magazine at http://www.newscientist.co.uk/ Then there is, of course the Encyclopedia Britannica Online for which you have to pay a subscription, at http://www.eb.com/

Often in our trademark examination work we need English and foreign language dictionaries. You can find some examples at:

http://www.dictionary.com/ from Lexico LLC
http://freedict.com/ which provides word translation between a number of world languages and English (either direction.)
http://www.onelook.com/ also provides a good lexical reference tool for common languages.

For medical terms, you can try http://www.medical-dictionary.com/ and for cosmetics, try out http://www.beauty.com/

Although the site is a commercial storefront, it has a search engine that can provide useful feedback on terminology in the cosmetics industry. If you want to check out an acronym, you can use http://www.ucc.ie/cgi-bin/acronym

What can we do about graphics in trademark applications? Well, one web resource is http://www.symbols.com/ which has an online dictionary of western graphic symbols.

If you need the international classification of goods and services, you can find one at http://webdb2.patent.gov.uk/ .

Finally, if you want to check for potential clashes with registered INTERNET domain names, check out http://www.register.com/

The Internet has resources to help those who want to use IP. For example, http://www.copyright.com/ is a portal into a service to license various uses of copyright works in the USA. Copyright rights licensing around the world is linked under the umbrella of the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organizations (IFFRO). Links to the websites of their member copyright rights licensing agencies can be found at http://www.ifrro.org/members/index.html#rro.

What if you want to trace the manager of a website to get permission to use material on it? You enter the website details at http://www.register.com/ as if you wanted to register the site yourself, and then when you get a response that the site name is taken, you click on the details and you will be given the details of the site's contact person.

If you need to trace proprietors of patents, you should be able to get sufficient information through the patent search websites that I have mentioned previously. Unfortunately, few trademark search databases are available at present.

http://www.nameprotect.com/tm_search.html provides a free search service for trade names: but of course it only checks conflicts on an exact match basis and there is no way that you can check for logos.

A final thing you may want to consider is whether a proposal that you are being presented is part of a known fraud. For the US, there is a National Inventor Fraud Center which operates a site at http://www.inventorfraud.com/

To provide warnings about known fraud schemes. For more general fraud warnings, you can try out http://www.fraud.org/

Finally, our own Intellectual Property Website is at http://www.ipd.gov.hk/ We provide comprehensive information about IP protection in Hong Kong. As out outsourcing project develops, we plan to make our websites available online for searching.