To be a cross-border e-commerce, how to effectively prevent patent infringement of selected products?

Due to the different degrees of attention paid to intellectual property rights at home and abroad, even though the sellers who are new to cross-border e-commerce in China have perfect supply chains and superb operation methods, they may still lose their efforts for one year because of infringement of foreign trademarks and patents, and not only will their income be frozen and they will face the risk of being completely deducted, but even their stores may not be preserved. Nowadays, sellers who want to be cross-border electronic commerce know clearly that “avoiding infringement” has become an inevitable topic. So how can we effectively avoid “infringement” at the source?

First and foremost, of course, we sellers can’t be lucky when choosing their own products, and don’t take risks to choose related products for temporary profit. Furthermore, when you inevitably want to use some familiar brands and trademarks, as long as you don’t want to rub the heat intentionally, use “for…” in the title or product description. Or Compatible with… ” Word mark’s infringement can be effectively avoided. The second is to learn to search the registered existing patents or trademarks. Today, this article will show you how to search patents with specific examples to help sellers and friends avoid infringement.

There are three kinds of common patents: appearance patents, invention patents and utility patents. The most common patent infringement in cross-border trade is appearance patent. So how to retrieve it?

The owners of general patents apply for patent protection in their own countries, and countries will upload these materials to the online free database. Moreover, the scope of patents often exists in more than one country, so it is very important for us to choose a comprehensive and wide-ranging database to retrieve patents. Here, taking the World Intellectual Property Organization (https://ipportal.wipo.int/) official website as an example, let’s take a look at how to retrieve patents.

Step 1: Open https://ipportal.wipo.int/, official website, and notice that official website can switch to Chinese, as shown in Figure 1. Slide down to find the option of “retrieve design” and click Enter. At this time, we can see that the interface of the database is switched to English again because it does not support Chinese.

figure 1

Step 2: Enter keywords in the upper left input box, taking “diamond earing” as an example, as shown in Figure 2. At the same time, the country on the right chooses the country where your store operates (the patents have national boundaries). As shown in Figure 3, we can see that there are 2937 appearance patents of this kind of products in the United States.

Figure 2

Figure 3

Step 3: Select “Locarno Design Classification” according to the product attributes (please refer to the link https://wenku.baidu.com/view/2a39702a00d8ce2f0066f5335a8102d276a26189.html for classification details), or you can directly enter the English words of the category, which will be automatically retrieved, and click Select. The diamond earrings we searched this time should be “jewelry” belonging to “decorative objects”, that is, 11-01, as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4

At this time, we can see that the range of search results has been reduced to 723 items, which seems to be too large, because the search results show all the results containing “diamond”, “earing” and “diamond earing”. If you want to narrow the range, you can search for “earing” in the keyword search bar, then search for “diamond”, and then repeat the above steps to select the country and Locarno design classification, which will greatly narrow the range.

Figure 5

In addition, you can note that in addition to the above methods, if you know the relevant information of the obligee, inventor and agent, the application number and registration number of the design, you can also click on the relevant search column on the left side of the page to search. On the right side of the page, the search results are mainly filtered according to your needs, such as country, registration year and classification number.

If you know that your product is similar to a brand, we can also check according to the brand:

Take the well-known brand Apple’s headphones as an example. We can enter the brand name in the column “Names” on the left, as shown in Figure 6. Click Search and then repeat the above steps to search for the relevant patent information of Apple headphones, as shown in Figure 7.

Figure 6

Figure 7

I hope the above information can help sellers and friends avoid patent infringement and avoid unnecessary losses.

Of course, in this way, our sellers are always in the defensive stage. Can we attack ahead of time and take the initiative? The answer is yes, especially for sellers with original strength, they can register their own patents or trademarks, and the first move is the best. In this way, it can not only avoid the risk of infringement, but also crack down on the phenomenon of selling, which can be described as killing two birds with one stone. How to prepare and apply specifically will be explained in the next article.

Thank you for reading, and today’s sharing is over. Maijia Support will continue to bring you the latest infringement news. For more exciting content, you can pay attention to the WeChat public platform-“Maijia Support”, and immediately check the latest trend of your US case, whether it is a default judgment and other sellers’ settlement and counterclaims (real-time synchronization of US judicial case system data). If a seller whose funds are frozen needs legal assistance in litigation and settlement, you can contact us on WeChat WeChat official account, and we will provide you with the best legal consulting service.