Institute for Internet Policy & Law @ Beijing Normal University

ICANN’s CEO and a group of top experts in China spoke at a Beijing event on December 8, 2011 aimed at informing, educating and engaging China’s business and Internet communities, as part of ICANN’s global gTLD communication program.

Beckstrom praised China’s role in helping to build a strong global Internet and for helping to make Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) a reality in China, for the benefit of its 1.3 billion people. IDNs facilitate the use of non-Latin characters, like Chinese, in Internet domain names.

Prof. Xue summarized the Chinese Internet community’s contribution to DNS and particularly to IDN technology and policy development. She emphasized the important of global outreach observing the principles of multilingualism and culture diversity.

2011年11月11日，应IIPL的邀请，美国乔治华盛顿大学全球和国际问题研究所主任谢苏珊（Susan K.Sell）教授来到我院为本科生作“知识产权与社会发展”的学术讲座。本次活动是为了进一步扩大IIPL及BNU的国际交流与合作，同时也是为了响应我校双语教学工作的开展而进行的又一次尝试。活动期间，苏珊教授受到了法学院党委书记张远煌教授的亲切会见。

 谢苏珊教授早年在加利福尼亚大学伯克利校区获得博士学位，研究领域主要涉及国际政治关系、南北关系等，且对于知识产权领域的国际政策、公共政策问题曾发表众多学术成果。此次交流活动主要分为两项内容。一项内容为英文学术讲座，苏珊教授从国际视角出发深入浅出地介绍了知识产权的政策性问题，讲座内容涉及作为公共政策的知识产权、知识产权相对于物权的特点、美国知识产权政策的经验以及国际政治经济中的知识产权等。我院的硕士生和博士生也参加了讲座。我院同学就知识产权的相关问题用英文积极提问，并得到了苏珊教授的耐心解答。活动的另一项内容为学术交流，薛虹教授与苏珊教授分别就当前知识产权领域的国际相关问题以及教学问题交换了意见。活动期间，苏珊教授表达了与我院共同进一步深化合作形式、拓展合作平台的意愿。

通过本次活动，一方面，增进了我院与国外学术界的联系，提高了我院的国际影响力；另一方面使同学们在知识产权领域的学习中开阔了国际视野，并激发了进一步提高外语水平，从而更好的掌握英语这一国际交流工具的热情。

ICANN 42th public meeting is going on from Sunday October 23, 2011 to Friday October 28, 2011 in Dakar, Senegal.  The trademark clearinghouse is going to take off despite many doubts and concerns.

The current plan has many flaws, particularly in the following aspects:

1. The trademark database that consists of the trademark registration information submitted from around the world is going to be confidential. This will definitely be detrimental to the people’s right to access public information and transparency and accountability of the services. All trademark registration information is publicly available. Why the database that put up the public information becomes confidential or restrictive accessible to pertinent registries or registrars, rather than public at large? The argument on database right or copyright of the database is not legally sound. Even if there could be such right generated under certain countries’ laws, it should not be used to claim against public access to the information included. The closure of the database is by all means a counteract to the global A2K movement.

2. The clearing house was designed primarily to protect the trademark in Latin scripts. It is poor design lack of diversity consideration. This is cultural arrogance showing the dominance of developed world at ICANN. Character variant issues are coming back to bite the process.

trademark clearinghouse and claim services would need to refer to the variant table for purpose of prevent cyber-squatting (variant squatting) against the Chinese-character trademarks. Otherwise, the service providers (without knowledge of Chinese language) would deem the domain names in simplified characters not visually similar to the trademark in traditional characters, vice verse.

“Variants” have never been an issue for China Trademark Office or Law Enforcement Agency when a trademark is applied for registration and/or seeking for legal protection. Any Chinese speakers know that simplified and traditional version of one character are equivalent. They don’t need the aid of the variant table. Someone who obviously knows neither Chinese language nor law attempted to argue that owner of a word mark in simplified form is entitle to claim the tradition form merely because the latter is “semantically” or “meaningfully” similar to the former. This is nonsense by all means. We should not mix the legal issue with the language variants issues. Character reform and evolution are the public knowledge of Chinese speakers, just like the upper case and lower case of Latin scripts. Is there any need for Latin script countries to enact a law to stipulate the trademark protection is not case sensitive? So, Chinese trademark protection is NOT variant sensitive!

The issue is only for the  Trademark Database and/or authentication & validation service providers who does not know Chinese and mechanically compare the virtual similarity of a word mark and a Domain Name string.

Although variants are “considered” in trademark examination or enforcement, they are not shown in trademark registration
certifications. If a word mark is applied for registration and approved by the trademark office, the certificate will merely show the
word (in either simplified or traditional characters) as it is, rather than listing all its variants. Then how to include the variants in TCH
database and how to verify those “non-registered” variants? Question is still there.

Taobao Mall is the country’s leading online retail platform, accounted for nearly a third of China’s online retail B2C market share in the second quarter, followed by 360buy.com’s 12.4 percent and amazon.cn’s 2.3 percent.

From early October 2011, a large number of small sellers on Tabao’s system went on a riot when the company earlier announced an up to 10-fold increase in membership fees, along with a maximum 15-fold increase in cash deposits, from next year. The proposed fees ignited a storm of protest online and the owners of some small businesses disrupted the site’s operation. The company believed that some of those responsible for the disruption had been fined by Taobao for selling fake products, Ma said.

Partially pressed by Ministry of Commerce, Taobao announced on October 18 revised fees and a 1.8 billion yuan ($282.2 million) investment plan to aid the development of small- and medium-sized enterprises, in a move seen as a conciliatory gesture following a bitter online fee dispute. But some small vendors insisted that the “fight for their rights” will continue.

The revised measures include a 9-month grace period for regular sellers, who have maintained good ratings, before new fees kick in. But those who register after the revised policy will have to pay the new fees from Jan 1, 2011.

The cash deposit paid by vendors will also be cut in half, and Alibaba will pay 1 billion yuan to make up the shortfall and invest that money to help small businesses. Alibaba said it would pay another 500 million yuan as a guarantee fund to help small online traders obtain loans from banks, and it will spend an extra 300 milllion yuan on technical support and promotion. However, stores at the bottom 10 percent in terms of customer satisfaction rating will not be eligible.

Alibaba’s online retail unit split into three sections in June. Taobao Mall enables businesses to sell to customers and Taobao Marketplace allows customers to trade with each other. The third section is a shopping-related search engine, eTao. Taobao Mall, the business-to-customer (B2C) section, connects consumers in China with retailers ranging from small operators to retail giants like Gap Inc of the US and the Uniqlo brand of Japan’s Fast Retailing Co. Alibaba said that a total of 50,000 traders are registered with Taobao Mall, and some 5 percent of vendors will be affected by the new policies.

The incident involves a number of legal issues and occurred at a sensitive moment when the draft of the Regulations on Internet Retails are being reviewed by the State Council and a variety of Ministerial Agencies. The new Regulations will set out an administrative license system for any Third-Party Transactional Platform services, such as Taobao. On the other hand, the market dominance by Taobao in Internet Retail Market raised the people’s concerns on competition and consumer protection. With respect to protection of SMEs in Internet Retails, there may be an issue of Internet governance subject to multi-stakeholder and transparency.

The Asia Pacific Trade Facilitation Forum 2011, under the theme of “Trade Facilitation beyond Borders: International Supply Chain Efficiency,” focusing on how trade facilitation can enhance supply chain efficiency, was held on October 3-8, 2011 in Seoul. Critical trade facilitation issues affecting the efficiency of regional and international supply chains were discussed. There were two events related to UNNeXT Legal Panel, which is primarily tasked to research the feasibility of a Regional Agreement on Electronic Exchange of Trade Data and Documents and provide the pertinent training materials and services for the stakeholders in the Region.

On October 6, 2011, The United Nations Network of Experts for Paperless Trade in Asia and the Pacific (UNNExT) had a side meeting at the Forum in the afternoon. The leads of each working group on legal issues, data harmonization, trade process and single window implementation gave a briefing on their works done so far. Prof. Xue presented on behalf of the legal panel and reported the outcome of Legal Panel Bangkok Meeting in July. The suggestions on the regional agreement attracted many comments from the audience.

On October 7-8, 2011, UNNExT Capacity Building Workshop on Addressing Legal Issues for Single Window Implementation and Paperless Trade was held at Seoul COEX Complex. The pilot workshop introduced participants to legal issues that need to be addressed to enable paperless trade and single window implementation at the national level, as well as to facilitate interoperability and interconnectivity of e-trade systems across borders. It built the capacity of participants to develop comprehensive and harmonized paperless trade legal frameworks, providing a sound legal basis for the operation and interoperability of national single windows and related e-business and e-logistics platforms. More than 20 countries’ delegations joined the workshop. Prof. Xue who reviewed the training materials prepared and presented by Prof. Rolf Weber, gave a presentation on the Legal Environment of Paperless Trade in China. The audience was particularly interested in the progress China made to legally enable and facilitate the electronic transaction, particularly on Internet Retails. Prof. Xue’s talk had got most questions of the workshop. These questions are on the electronic signatures and transactional data that are newly subject to national regulations.