How to make sure the qualification and quality of a trademark service provider in China?

Guess how many trademark service providers are registered in CTMO? The answer is more the 20,000. But I would say 95% of the service providers are doing the business as a side gig, most of the service providers file less than 100 per year. My firm filed more than 6000 filings this year, amony which more than 5300 are trademark mark applications.

So how to find professional force? Check the numbers of applications in CTMO public gazette, if such service provide has publications on consecutive 3-10 publications, it is likely to be a professional firm.

Like you can check from 1740-1746, with the name of 100IPservice （一百分知识产权）, you can find my firm got 954 initial approvals in the past 6 weeks.

This proves my firm is a professional firm and we do produce good results for clients.

What are the place names you cannot apply as trademark in China?

 An applicant was fined for 1000 RMB for application of the trademark “Chosin Reservoir”(长津湖).  The decision of fine is made because “Chosin Reservoir” is a main battlefield back to the 1950s when Chinese volunteer army combated the US army, and such application is easy to incur bad social influence.

I have helped my clients applying words with Chine (the french word of China) in the US and in Hongkong, local trademark office just asked the applicant to waive the exclusive rights to Chine.  Unliky the case in other jurisdictions, Chinese trademark law prohibit the registration of (1) place names of an adminstrative area higher than county level (included); (2) place names of foreign famous places.  But what is famous? I do not think CTMO has clear standard, like once one of my clients applied a word including the name gissen, CTMO rejected such application.  Then I came to realize Gissen is a city near Frankfurt, which has 100K of population, which I never knew before the rejection.  And for another time, CTMO rejected the application containing the word Hamburger just because it contains Hamburg, funny.

The fine on Chosin Reservoir has a little bit different logic, since it is affecting the national feeling of China.  It is similar to the “thor mountain” case at the beginning of the cov-19 pandemic, the constructors built the hospital named thor mountain in 30 days to save lives, it is a symbol of Chinese people to fight against the virus, but people still tried to apply trademarks using thor mountain.  At least hundreds of companies are fined for “thor mountain” back to 2019.

So applicants should be pretty careful when applying place names.