TRIPs Agreement and Enforcement of the Intellectual Property Rights in China

It is generally accepted that China’s legislation including the provisions on enforcement of intellectual property rights has met the requirements of the TRIPS agreement and its government has exerted best efforts to enforce intellectual property laws, as illustrated by the institution of executive bodies, the dual-track approach system for protecting IPRs and other actions in this field. However, enforcement of IPRs is still a critical problem for China to solve because the protection standards of IPRs are beyond its economic development and education level, local protectionism interferes with enforcement, insufficient severity of punishment against infringers fails to deter, the price of genuine IP products is overinflated and a legal culture of not observing laws in China. To eliminate the roots of difficulties in enforcing IP laws, awareness of protecting IPRs and abiding by IP laws should be improved. Also, the IPR enforcement system should be further perfected by, centralizing the power of IPR enforcement by merging the current executive bodies into fewer ones with certain focuses, increasing the severity of punishment against infringers of IPRs and cracking down against local protectionism.