China’s CNIPA Issues 2024 Guidelines for IP Development

On April 10, 2024 China’s National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) issued the Annual Work Guidelines for Promoting High-Quality Development of Intellectual Property Rights (2024) (推动知识产权高质量发展年度工作指引(2024)). Per CNIPA, the Guidelines were formulated to “further improve intellectual property work in 2024 and accelerate the promotion of high-quality development of intellectual property.” The main objectives of the Guidelines include improving the quality of patent applications; increase patent conversion; improve patent enforcement including guidance for overseas intellectual property disputes; improve provincial and local government IP management; and improve government intellectual property services.

Highlights from the Guidelines include:

• The average review cycle for invention patents has been reduced to about 15.5 months, and the average review cycle for trademark registration applications has remained stable at 4 months.
• Promote the use of patent conversion as an important evaluation indicator standard in project review, institutional evaluation, enterprise identification, talent evaluation, professional title assessment and other work involving patent indicators.
• Continue to strictly regulate abnormal patent applications and malicious trademark registration, strengthen the quality guarantee and business guidance for examination and authorization, and strictly control quality at the source.
• Accelerate the new round of revisions of the Trademark Law and its Implementing Regulations, research on special legislation for geographical indications, and revise the Regulations on the Protection of Layout Designs of Integrated Circuits.
• Continue to promote the revision of the “Guidelines for Trademark Examination and Trial.”
• Implement the patent industrialization plan to promote the growth of small and medium-sized enterprises, accelerate the gathering of knowledge, technology, funds, talents and other elements to small and medium-sized enterprises, and create patent industrialization model enterprises.
• Continue to carry out special actions to improve the patent and trademark agency quality monitoring and credit evaluation mechanisms.
• Deeply participate in the review of cooperation projects between the five intellectual property offices of China, the United States, Europe, Japan and South Korea.
• Continue to strengthen multilateral cooperation and exchanges between China and Europe, China and the United States, China, Japan and South Korea, China-ASEAN, China-Central Asia, China, Mongolia and Russia, China and Africa, China and Latin America and other countries and regions.
• Consolidate and expand the patent prosecution highway cooperation network.
• Further optimize the intellectual property statistical data resource provision mechanism in accordance with the principle of “providing as much information as possible, providing as much information as possible, and providing information as early as possible.”
• Cooperate with the United States, Europe, Japan and South Korea to release statistical reports from the world’s five largest intellectual property offices, and promote cooperation among the five offices in green patent statistics and monitoring.

The full Guidelines and Task List are available here (Chinese only).