Protect Intellectual Property Rights of Chinese Characters

The associate director and secretary-general of the Chinese Information Processing Society of China Sun Le expressed his worry, “Currently, China does not protect intellectual property rights of Chinese character styles very well. Therefore, once foreign enterprises of Chinese character styles and computer typefaces have entered the market of the Chinese mainland, local enterprises of Chinese character styles and typefaces will be heavily impacted or purchased. Then, Chinese people or enterprises will even have to buy Chinese character typefaces from foreign enterprises of Chinese character typefaces.”

Is it intellectual property right protection or monopoly?

As voices of calling for protecting intellectual property rights of Chinese character styles keep coming out, some people also have such as question: If relevant legal suggestions are accepted, the public will have to pay for using a new Chinese character style, and therefore, will the public's interests be affected?

In 2008, since the Procter and Gamble widely used a special Chinese character style of the Founder Electronics on packages and trademarks of many of its products including the Rejoice shampoo, the Founder Electronics took the Procter and Gamble to the People's Court of Haidian District of Beijing. The Procter and Gamble believed that the characters are a main information carrier and play the role of transmitting information, Chinese characters should not be monopolized by a few enterprises, and the Founder Electronics did not possess the copyright of the special Chinese character style. The lawyer representing the Procter and Gamble said in the court that they were fighting for not the Procter and Gamble but the society.

Then, will the protection of Chinese character styles affect the public's daily uses of Chinese characters? The head of the Intellectual Property School under the Tongji University Tao Xinliang said that people do not need to pay for using the traditional Chinese character styles without copyrights, the Chinese character styles slightly modified based on these traditional styles or individual characters of these styles, but people should pay for using the Chinese character styles heavily modified based on the traditional styles or highly creative Chinese character styles. In fact, at least 95 percent of Chinese character styles used by the people are free of charge, and therefore it is needless to be afraid that the monopoly of Chinese character styles will damage the public's interests.

Making law is the key for breaking the deadlock.