Vancouver Mandarin Chinese Intellectual Property Lawyer

Looking for a law firm that serves the interests of Chinese business owners in Vancouver?

Look no further. Our experienced intellectual property lawyers are fluent in Mandarin Chinese, and we are ready to help you protect your business interests. 

Intellectual property is a lucrative part of any business. We can help you proactively protect yours, and we can help you launch the litigation that will keep others from imposing on your rights. We can also defend you should another party claim you are using their intellectual property.

We do it all in your native language, giving you the best chance of understanding and responding to every corner of your intellectual property landscape. 

Protection for Trademarks

Trademarks are a vital part of your brand. Everything from the name of your company and products to the logos that you use to help customers recognize your products is important to your business. When someone uses your trademark they cut into your market share.

Trademarks should be registered with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO). This gains your company exclusive rights to use the mark for fifteen years, and this 15-year period can be renewed. 

Registration helps you by giving you the ability to have your trademark enforced. It’s almost impossible to get the courts to enforce your trademark without this registration. 

These trademarks can also be licensed. This is something that allows companies to create franchises. 

It is vital for most companies to respond when they find another company using their trademarks, or using something close to their trademarks. 

Protection for Copyrights

Copyrights cover written works, visual works, art works, and other media. Many companies create these works for a wide variety of reasons. For example, it is very common for CEOs to write books to seal their reputations as thought leaders, and many companies create video or radio content to help market their business. 

For certain companies, the copyrighted content is the product. Companies that produce books, games, or content must be ready to respond when their work is stolen or plagiarized. 

Technically, copyrights get created as soon as the work is made, so long as you were a citizen or subject or a person resident of a treaty country like Canada or the United States. This can create some issues for Chinese business owners, issues which we help our clients navigate. 

Holding a copyright means that you have the exclusive right to produce, reproduce, perform, publish, or sell the work or any part of the work in question. You also have moral rights: the right to be associated with the work by name or pseudonym or to remain anonymous, and the right to expect that none will change the work in a way that damages your reputation, or your company’s reputation. 

Yet it is also wise to register copyrights. It gives others notice that you hold the copyright and makes it easier to enforce your rights in court. This is because it puts certain parties on notice that the work is protected, and makes it easier for people to search for your work when they’re checking to see if their work is too close to yours.

Protection for Patents

Patents protect inventions. They give you the right to decide who may or may not construct, make, or use the invention. The patent gives you a 20 year grace period after it is registered and approved. After that, anyone is free to begin producing their own version of the invention. 

To count as an invention, the property in question must be an art, process, machine, manufacture, method, or useful improvement on any of these things. The invention must be completely new and useful, and non-obvious to a skilled craftsmen in the relevant technical area.

Our office can help you apply for patents. Move fast if you’ve already told the public about your invention, as you have just one year to protect this intellectual property. In addition, you might wish to secure our help with applying for patents in every other country you might be doing business in. 

Protection for Trade Secrets

Many businesses have secrets that allow them to do business at all. Examples include Google’s algorithm, the top-secret Coca-Cola recipe, and Waymo’s robotaxi navigation designs. T-Mobile is currently fighting to keep its 2.5 GHz leases a secret. If you can think of a company with a unique product or service that all but defines it, then you can probably guess at the existence of certain trade secrets.

Yet protecting trade secrets is not always straightforward. 

To count as a trade secret, the information must be secret in an absolute or relative sense, which means only a few people in your company must know about it. You must have taken reasonable measures to protect the secret. It must also be a secret with a relevant industrial or commercial application. Finally, you must be able to show you have an economic interest in the secret that makes it worthy of protection.

There’s no registration process for protecting a trade secret, but there are measures that you can take to ensure that information that is important to your company is treated as a trade secret. Some of these involve the use of non-disclosure and other legal agreements. Others will involve steps only you can take for your company, such as taking steps to physically secure the information. 

We can also help you enforce the protection of these secrets by blocking the use of them should anyone take steps to illegally obtain them. 

Protection of Industrial Designs

For some of our clients, industrial designs are part of their brand. Industrial design is less about how the device functions and more about how it looks or feels, but protecting this intellectual property is, nevertheless, important. 

We can help you protect exclusive rights to your branded design for up to 10 years from the date of registration, and to stay on top of the maintenance fees that you’ll have to pay to keep this protection in place. 

Protection of Integrated Circuit Topographies

Integrated circuit topographies covers the design and configuration of microchips. Like industrial designs, it is possible to protect your ability to exclusively reproduce and manufacture these electronic chips for a period of up to ten years.

We can help you register and protect your topographies, keeping you competitive in a fast-paced marketplace.

Intellectual Property Litigation

When others try to make use of your intellectual property, you must depend your rights. We take the necessary steps to make infringers cease and desist their use of your IP, or to seek injunctions against the use of the IP. 

Failing that, we take them to court to force them to stop, and to recover the economic damages they’ve created by using what is not theirs to use.

Unfortunately, many companies also find themselves having to defend themselves against infringement charges. Patent lawsuits are very common. It’s not unusual to find that there are multiple claimants to the same idea, or to very similar ideas. 

Litigation can cover everything from stopping companies from selling counterfeit versions of your products to cybersquatting and domain name litigation. It encompasses everything that it takes to protect your brand, your good name, your company’s products, and your ideas. 

Fortunately, we are skilled litigators, and we are ready to fight for you. 

FAQ

What are common violations of intellectual property rights?

Common violations that business owners face include:

• Trademark or service mark infringement
• Misappropriation of trade secrets
• Patent infringement suits
• Copyright infringement suits
• Counterfeiting suits

All of these disputes are about protecting the profitability of the companies involved, as well as protecting the competitive advantage that each of these companies may have. 

How can you defend against a claim of patent infringement?

One way is to claim that the patent is invalid. If the patent is found to be valid, we can also help you by showing how your activities do not infringe on the patent. 

This defense requires technical expertise, and the resources to work with technical experts who can look at earlier versions of similar technology in order to show that the patent is not novel enough to make the patent valid. 

Why Choose Us? 

Work with Mandarin-speaking lawyers with decades of experience handling intellectual property law. We will take the steps that will help you proactively protect your IP while enforcing its proper use in the marketplace. 

We have worked with a wide variety of companies in a wide variety of industries, and are known for our proactive, responsive approach to protecting the business interests of our clients.

Call to set up an appointment today. You’ll be matched with one of our skilled Mandarin-Chinese speaking IP lawyers. We’ll sit down with you to discuss your current and future IP protection needs. When your business success hinges on IP, you can’t afford to go it alone.

Chinese Lawyer Vancouver serves clients in Vancouver, Abbotsford, Langley, Surrey, and White Rock. Call to set up an appointment today.