The Standing Committee of the National People's Congress passed new amendments to the PRC Trademark Law on 30 August 2013, which will come into effect on 1 May 2014. Key features of the new law include:
- imposing an obligation to uphold the principle of good faith on new filings;
- raising the maximum statutory damages for infringement to RMB 3 million and raising administrative fines to be up to 5 times the illegal business turnover;
- including sounds as registrable trademarks; and
- allowing multi-class and e-filing applications.
There are also substantial procedural changes that IP owners should take note of, including the removal of a party's ability to file reviews on unsuccessful trademark oppositions, which has been replaced with cancellation procedures instead.
On 25 October 2013, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress passed an amendment to the law on Protection of Consumer Rights and Interests to add provisions related to the increasing popularity of online transactions. The amendments impose various obligations on business operators to protect personal data held by them, including:
- obtaining consent from customers prior to collection of their personal data;
- keeping customer personal data confidential and not to disclose, sell or illegally disclose such data to others; and
- imposing a burden on such operators to implement appropriate security measures.
Failure to comply with these new obligations will attract administrative fines of up to 10 times an unlawful gain or RMB 500,000 in the event that there is no gain.
On a similar note, China is also looking to update its legislation on e-commerce through the issuance of a draft Online Commodity Trading and Related Services Administrative Procedure on 11 September 2013. The objective of this draft procedure is to regulate online commodity and trading conduct to protect both consumers and business operators. Some of the changes include adding a provision that outlines the State Administration of Industry and Commerce's powers to investigate suspected illegal online transactions or services as well as imposing obligations on third party platforms to take action against unscrupulous vendors who mislead consumers or infringe third party intellectual property.
