As I will attend a EU-SINO workshop on IPR protection at trade fairs next Monday (or calling it training or seminar may look more proper), I have to do some homework beforehand.

Internet is definitely the most wonderful invention. By inputing few keywords, you can access hundrends of thousands of web sources. So it takes me almost the whole morning to filter the search results, which was of course conducted with google. oh, forget about baidu, it has not make progress in technology recent year, and more annoyingly, the first several results are companies paying for promotion, which are normally the results we want.

well, back to the track. There are several web sites containing useful information for IPR protection at trade fairs. The first one, which also is the one I strongly recommend, is http://www.china-iprhelpdesk.eu. You can find a mannul therein. The second one is jetro.go.jp. Hopefully you know japanese. The second web site seems sponsored by the goverment and it provides useful investigation reports and information about economy, politics and policy for free. In addition, the wipo.int is another useful source for IPR protection. You can subscribe to it, and as a sequence, the news, articles and reports will be delivered to you regularly, seemingly every two weeks if I remember correctly. By the way, most of articles are focused on SME. If anybody knows the reason, you are very appreciated to tell me why.

Briefly, an IPR office will be established in a trade show/expos/fair lasting longer than 3 days. The IPR office is composed of representatives from organizer, ministry of commerce and administrative departments for patent, copyright and trade mark. It acts as a coordinator for IPR enforcement departments, more specifically, the claim or complaint satisfying formal requirements shall be transferred to the corresponding administrative department within 24 hours.

From the viewpoint of right owner, he shall make preparations before the commence of the trade fair, which includes notarizing/legalizing documents, identifying the rights to be potentially infringed etc. In the course of the trade fair, he shall identify the suspented infringer timely, and if possible, he shall consider measures to be taken after the trade fair.

A link to an article is attached below FYI: IPR Protection at Trade Fairs. ご覧ください