Mr Liu feels he has no recourse. Here he explains what IP is exactly about, and why it can be vitally important for even the smallest firms. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites Despite having now changed the rule to the "first-to-file" principle, the US still offers inventors an added protection: if they reveal an idea at a conference or publish it elsewhere they have a one-year grace period to file, during which they take precedence over others.An acronym referring to "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory". President Xi Jinping recently led lawmakers, at their annual gathering in Beijing, in The Foreign Investment Law states that the transfer of technology from foreign investors to any domestic partner must be voluntary.
This involves a degree of subjectivity and is often one of the most hotly-debated issues in legal challenges.
But these potential fat profits encourage new ideas. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.The following glossary should help make sense of what some of the key terms mean:The person applying for the patent may decide to give up on the process before their filing is approved. These are external links and will open in a new window There was no break in, no hold up. "A couple of years ago one of my IT managers copied ten thousand pages of my entire company's profile," Frank Liu told me. In some countries the courts can force an owner into licensing their invention.For a patent to be granted, the invention must be novel in the sense that it is new. They can be fined for making a false claim.A previous use or publication of an invention which might invalidate its claim to be novel. RELATED INTERNET LINKS: They are supposed to settle cases within 12 to 18 months. This can be used to show a later filing by another party in another country was not "novel".Patent offices typically publish an application 18 months after the date it was filed unless there is a reason it should be kept secret or the inventor has explicitly abandoned the process. Patent trolls: Tracking down the litigious invention ownersBreonna Taylor family: 'Hold every officer accountable' VideoBreonna Taylor family: 'Hold every officer accountable''From that one arrest, I was in financial debt' VideoInside the Indian company betting big on Covid vaccines. A failure to pay renewal fees in time will lead to the patent lapsing. Considering IP in a business plan can, however, be only the starting point for actively managing this potentially valuable asset. Also, learn about data protection, intellectual property and Creative Commons licences. Industry bodies such as the Institute of Electrical Engineers (IEEE) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) then take steps to ensure the owner licenses or otherwise makes the patents available to others.Separate from patents, but sometimes administered by the same body, trade marks are the distinctive name or symbol used to identity a product made by a manufacturer or a good distributed by a dealer. Examples of such technologies include the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), a cellular standard at the heart of 3G data; and H.264, a video compression format used by YouTube, Blu-ray disks and Adobe Flash Player among others. If that follows, then he thinks "potentially the foreign IP owners will have more to protect [them] in China. Available now This commits the owner to offering a licence to all so long as the applicants agree to a non-excessive fee. A derogatory term used for firms which build up patent libraries in order to sue or otherwise aggressively pursue others for payment for the right to use their inventions, while making few if any products of their own.