Last month, China’s State Intellectual Property Office released a draft regulation governing employment inventions for public comment. If implemented, the draft regulation would grant significant rights to employee inventors and would affect all companies conducting research and development in China. Notably, the draft regulation would limit the employer and employee’s freedom to contract out of the default employment inventions regime, would significantly increase the default amounts of reward and remuneration for employment inventions, and would impose a report and response regime governing employment inventions.
The deadline for submitting comments to the State Intellectual Property Office is December 3.
For more information, please see this Covington E-Alert, the draft regulation (in Chinese), an explanation accompanying the draft regulation (in Chinese), and this unofficial English translation of the draft regulation.