24 September, 2007
Intellectual Property Court Delayed until 1 July 2008
The Chinese-language media reported last week that Taiwan's long awaited Intellectual Property Court will not begin hearing cases until July 1, 2008. The new court was originally expected to begin hearing cases in August 2007, but that date was pushed back until January 2008 last month.
According to these reports, Kao Hsiu-chen (高秀真), director of the Judicial Yuan's Department of Administrative Litigation and Discipline, has announced that the Intellectual Property Court's Preparatory Office is now up and running but will need 10 more months to be certified and complete renovations.
The Intellectual Property Court will sit in Banciao, Taipei County's administrative seat, where it will hear civil, criminal, and administrative disputes over intellectual property. For civil disputes, the court will serve as both the trial court and the appellate court. The Supreme Court will be the court of last resort for civil IP matters.
Criminal IP complaints, however, will continue to be heard in ordinary District Courts while the new IP Court will be the intermediate appellate court. The court of last resort in criminal IP cases will be the Supreme Court.
Administrative IP cases will be heard by the IP Court in the first instance with the Supreme Administrative Court directly hearing appeals as the court of last resort.
Kao noted the importance of intellectual property to Taiwan by observing that Taiwanese inventors ranked fourth for the number of patents filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 2005. Taiwan also files significant numbers of patent applications in the EU, Japan, and South Korea.
