Personally I am in 2 minds. Firstly, I think it is good for...

Personally I am in 2 minds. Firstly, I think it is good for marketing given the enormity of China’s market potential. However, I am also worried about the theft of IMU’s intellectual property. Anyway, I found this on a website for registering a patent in China, and it is detailed for companies from other countries:

1. Invention Patent (Type of patent for registration of this type)

- Sign an NDA to protect your valuable IP information;
- Title of the invention;
- Applicant’s name and address (person or company);
- Inventor’s name and address;
- A brief description of the invention and the aspects that require protection;
- Patent Technical disclosure documents;
- Illustrations and detailed information about the patented subject matter.

Now, after reading about how registering patents in China works, to me, it is apparent as to why Imugene might have gone down this route. In China, they have a ‘first to lodge’ rule regarding a patent. They are not interested in who came up with the idea first. It is purely on who registered first! So IMU may be thinking, that if they get in first, they will be protected.

As IMU has registered already in other jurisdictions, there is a risk, as apparently has been the case for thousands of products, that once a patent is in another country, if it gets copied, there is nothing stopping another company with sinister intentions from rushing to China’s patent office and getting in there first. This would be lucrative, given the population of China. One only needs to look at BYD etc to see how lucrative the car market there is. China is the biggest market for nearly everything.

Yet, as per my first sentence, my biggest fear is that Chinese government offices are loyal to China, and it might not be that long before the technology so heavily guarded and protected by IMU is handed over for their own benefit. I am not saying it would necessarily happen, it is just a fear I now hold.

As someone eloquently posted before, Copywright in China simply means, ‘Copy it Right’. Then again, we cannot hide in the dark forever, and we have to get out there amongst it in order to be seen.

GLTAH. Onward