• THE INTERNATIONAL COMMERCE & LAW REVIEW
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• v.69
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• pp.699-720
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• 2016

In the past 10 years, there have been lots of misuses of the trademark system in China. For example, some Chinese companies have registered same or similar oversea's well-known trademark as a prior rights holder, and oversea's companies lost a chance to register their own trademarks or commence cases to acquire their own trademark determination in China. So Chinese government revised Chinese Trademark Law in 2014 to remedy these mistakes. Article 30 is intended to crack down on preemptive registration and compensate for the possible unfair consequences resulted from the principle of prior registration. Under the principle of prior registration, only where the unregistered trademarks of prior use have certain influence, and where the applicant of latter applied trademark knows or should know the prior trademark and the applicant has the bad faith of obtaining unjustified interests from goodwill of such unregistered marks, it shall be curbed by Article 30. Furthermore, trademark oppositions could be filed by anybody previously. Under the revised Trademark Law Article 44, oppositions based on absolute grounds can still be filed by anyone, but oppositions based on other available grounds can only be filed by a prior rights holder or a materially-interested party with undefined but similar to the standing requirement for filing nullities under Article 41 of the old law, and likely intended to cover trademark licensees and successors.