Protect Intellectual Property Rights of Chinese Characters

The Chinese character typeface development of China should not rely on the protection of intellectual property rights, but if China wants overcome the bottleneck of its industry of Chinese character styles, China must guarantee the protection of intellectual property rights. The Chinese character styles and typefaces' intellectual property rights take copyrights as the core, including the software copyright and fine art copyright. But currently, China does not have clear regulations for either of them. It is still disputable how to break the deadlock.

Gao said there has been a consensus that Chinese font software should be protected under the Regulations on the Protection of Computer Software. The industry is mainly divided on whether font design may be protected under the copyright law as works of fine art. There is no disagreement about protecting Chinese character fonts, the distillate of the Chinese civilization, through the intellectual property law. The disagreement lies in the ways to protect font design, including copyright protection, design patent protection, protection through unfair competition, or placing it under the protection of a new law.

According to Gao, there is no international experience to draw on in protecting font design through the law. The State Council has assigned the task of solving this problem to a group of government bodies such as the Legislative Affairs Office of the State Council, State Intellectual Property Office, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and Supreme People's Court. The group is led by the National Copyright Administration.

Source: People's Daily

Editor: Xu Xinlei