Study On Patent Barriers To Trade And Countermeasures

In the age of knowledge economy and globalization, the impact of intellectual property rights on economy and trade is ever-growing. The patent is one of important part of intellectual property, and is very important to innovation. It does not mean to restrict international trade and investment at the beginning. But in the situation that worldwide competition is fierce and traditional tariff barriers and non-tariff barriers to trade have been limited and regulated, the developed countries and relative companies with technical superiority began to use patents as a reasonable and lawful tool to build barriers to trade. In order to safeguard their interests all over the world and maintain the leading edge of technology and profit, the developed countries and their companies developed and advanced the form of patent-related barriers to trade through patent scheme and trade policies and try to combine of patents protection with trade.China is affected by these patent-related trade barriers increasingly which are very difficult to deal with. At the same time, China also needs a suitable patent protection system to provide proper patent protection to promote domestic innovation in science and technology. This dissertation is trying to have an in-depth study on the patent-related barriers to trade and investment and find out how domestic patent system construction and perfection can function to deal with patent-related barriers effectively.This dissertation collects and summarizes the patent-related barriers to trade and investment that China is currently faced with, studies the patent-related barriers both in enterprise level and government level, uses the Nordhaus model as a starting point of the mathematical analysis, uses game theory as an analytical tool to analyze the influential factors of the patent-related barriers under the conditions of open economy, and uses econometrics methods to analyze the relationship between the export of various types of technology products and patent barriers to trade. This dissertation regards patent system as the core of the patent-related barriers, analyses the key issues in China’s patent system, then gives suggestions on the improvement of patent system to counter the patent-related barriers.This dissertation analyzes the international evolution of patent system through the perspective of the development of patent-related barriers, and gives an explain to the reason why the Protection of Industrial Property Paris Convention, the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs Agreement), the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), the Patent Law Treaty (PLT) and the Substantive Patent Law Treaty draft (SPLT) are established. This dissertation also highlights the functioning mechanism of different types of patent-related barriers and the impact pattern, esp. how different kind of patent-related barriers functions through patent system. The dissertation also studies the impact of patent-related barriers on China’s foreign trade with specific case studies on patent litigation and patent license,337investigation, and also patent accumulation and patent speculation. This dissertation finds that with China’s foreign trade competitiveness being on the rise, the exports of technology-intensive products expands constantly, which has brought challenges and threats to competitors in developed countries. Meanwhile, although China has made much progress in the protection of intellectual property, it’s still insufficient in the intellectual property awareness, institution building, and talent pool, and the capacity of technological innovation and intellectual achievements transformation needs to be improved. In this situation, the developed countries are trying to make use of its comparative advantage on technology and patent institution, and set various trade barriers, seeking to maintain and even expand its dominant position. Faced with this situation, feasible approach for China is to strengthen the construction of the patent system and improve the capability to deal with patent barriers.On the basis of the above analysis on patent-related barriers to trade, the dissertation turns to the key issue of China’s patent system, such as the patent dispute settlement mechanism and the patent agent market, and discusses the present situation and the problems in detail. Finally, the dissertation puts forward some suggestions, includes that China should strengthen the multilateral cooperation and dialogue in the field of the patent protection, raising the patent protection awareness in the whole society, esp. in enterprises, and flourishing the market of patent-related services. For the patent system, the dissertation suggests to establish an Arbitration and Mediation Center for patent disputes, and improve the system of the patent intermediary agents and increase their efficiency. All the suggestions are raised to construct a better patent environment and improve the protection and management of patents and encourage innovation, thus it is possible for China to deal with the patent-related barriers better.