Foxconn rep says 90 per cent of Chinese patents are useless

SPEAKING AT China's Innovative National Construction and Intellectual Property Symposium recently, a representative of one of the country's largest electronics manufacturers said that 90 per cent of one category of new Chinese patents are useless.

Foxconn's Fu Shaoming, director of its Intellectual Property Management Department, said that most of China's so-called "practical and new" class of patents are actually worthless and ought to be cancelled. His remarks are said to have caused a stir in China, possibly due to the fact that 161,366 patents in the "practical and new" category were registered in China during 2006 alone.

Oddly, China has three distinct categories of patents, one for inventions like other countries, another for the so-called "practical and new", and a third for "outlook designs", whatever those are.

Most of such Chinese "practical and new" patents reportedly cover technology designs for product shapes, structures and combinations -- things that probably wouldn't be considered patentable elsewhere, because they would likely fail the test of non-obviousness. µ

L'INQ
ChinaTechNews