The draft was announced by the Patent Protection Association of China on 5 June 2023 at the link below:
My observations are as below:
- The deposit service is not only available for depositing technical secrets during development of potentially patentable and copyrightable achievements, but also for preservation of evidence including pictures, audio, video, and webpages. This service could be useful for litigation in China.
- The deposited evidence would be encrypted. Not sure by what technology though. Blockchain?
- The deposit service should not issue "certificates for untrue and illegal matters" (point 4.2). Does this mean that the deposit service has to verify the evidence before deposition? If so, how?
- It is not clear (at least to me) how trade secret deposition would be handled. For example, while point 6.1.2b) provides guidance on the standard on how the technical secret is to be generated, it is not clear whether the technical secret would be kept confidence at the deposit service, for how long, and conditions/mechanisms when such secrets no longer need to be kept confidence (like has already been published by a patent publication).
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