The Impact of the New Taiwan Intellectual Property Court upon the Practice of Litigating Patent and Copyright Cases

Abstract

The shaping of a modern intellectual property (IP) legal regime has been driven by the forces of globalisation and the respective regional conditions; nonetheless, the commands of globalisation have often conflicted with the requests from regional individualities. Bearing in mind the conflict of a global standard and a local remedy, this thesis uses Taiwan as an example for answering the following questions:

1. How does a country cope with international and national pressures in terms of IP rights and legal enforcement with particular regard to the establishment of the Taiwan Intellectual Property Court?
2. What impact does the Taiwan Intellectual Property Court have upon specific categories of IP litigations, legal practices and legal professions?
3. What impact has the establishment of the Taiwan Intellectual Property Court had in theory and in practice?

The Taiwan Intellectual Property Court was inaugurated, on 1 July 2008, to face the international political and economic pressures, as well as the domestic needs of intellectual property (IP) litigation reforms. The aim of this research is to understand the theory and the practice of the Taiwan Intellectual Property Court. To carry out this research, documentary evidence will be applied using a systematic approach to understand the theoretical framework and background of the Taiwan Intellectual Property Court, and the gap between the theory and the actual practices will be analysed through the use of qualitative interviews with a number of the major players in IP litigations, including: the lawyers, the specialised judges and the technical examination officers.

This first chapter of thesis will begin with an introduction which will provide an overview of this research. The second chapter will offer a global perspective of the different IP courts in the world, in order to examine their respective features, performances and justifications. Subsequently in the third chapter, the evolution of the Taiwan Intellectual Property Court will be presented to determine whether the Taiwan Intellectual Property Court has unique settings when compared to the other parallel parties depicted in the previous chapters. In the fourth and fifth chapters, patent and copyright litigations will be identified as examples to explain how the various types of IP litigations have individual characteristics and how the performance of the Taiwan Intellectual Property Courts vary, due to the features of the category of litigations. After probing into the impact of the IP courts upon patent and copyright litigations, the sixth chapter will direct attention to the litigation practices and the legal professionals by discussing their views and perspectives on the impact of the Taiwan Intellectual Property Court. Finally in the last chapter, an analytical conclusion of the thesis will be drawn, in order, to integrate the arguments and findings presented in previous chapters and to identify the actual impact of the Taiwan Intellectual Property Court in theory and in practice.