Hainan province will take the lead in China in the management of intellectual property rights and will build the Sanya Yazhou Bay Science and Technology City Intellectual Property Special Zone, authorities said. The opening ceremony of the Hainan Center of the China Copyright Protection Center was held in Sanya Yazhou Bay Science and Technology City on October 22. The center is the first and only branch of the China Copyright Protection Center. It will carry out copyright verification and protection, value assessment, copyright trading, and the international exchange of copyrights, mainly for software, cultural and literary productions and digital works. Sanya will give full play to Hainan’s policy advantages, which allow active trials, and the China Copyright Protection Center’s rich resources, said Zhou Hongbo, Party Secretary of Sanya. “We’ll further improve the one-stop intellectual property public service system, enhance the level of copyright creation, application, protection, management and service, undertake international cultural trade, and carry out copyright confirmation and protection, value assessment, copyright transaction, copyright international exchange and other services, and strive to explore more practices that can be replicated and promoted,” Zhou added.
The significance of the Sanya Yazhou Bay Science and Technology City Intellectual Property Special Zone lies in its high concentration of administrative management and law enforcement functions of patents, trademarks, copyrights, geographical indications and new varieties of plants, as well as the precision and efficiency of its management services, he explained. With the one-stop service system, granting a patent is shortened from months to a few working days. For example, the application of an invention patent submitted by the Hainan Tropical Ocean University Yazhou Bay Innovation Institute was authorized within 24 working days, a process which used to take at least 20 months to review.
“In the pre-trial process, we will help institutes and enterprises conduct professional checks to ensure that a submission is successful and effectively save case handling time. The fast track for patent pre-examination ensures that patent applications can be processed at the fastest speed, and the efficient linkage of the process greatly reduces the time for patent review,” said Lin Shukun, Auditor of the Sanya Intellectual Property Center in Yazhou Bay Science and Technology City the China Daily reports.
A national-level intellectual property protection demonstration zone will also be established in Shanghai’s Pudong New Area by 2025. It will be among the country’s initial group of 10 such zones nationwide, according to Gu Huirong, Manager of the IP Protection Division of the Shanghai Intellectual Protection Administration. The other IP zones will be in the Binhai New Area in Tianjin, in Nanjing and Suzhou in Jiangsu province, Hangzhou and Ningbo in Zhejiang province, Hefei in Anhui province, Guangzhou and Shenzhen in Guangdong province, and Chengdu in Sichuan province. The initiative is the first national-level demonstration project in the field of IP rights approved by the State Council.
