Shanghai government officials and experts yesterday held a round table with their US counterparts to discuss intellectual property rights policies and professional training.

Mutual understanding is seen as a prerequisite to new policies and necessary to guard against intellectual property rights (IPR) infringements.

"Cooperation with overseas IPR holders is very important for us to prevent IPR encroachment," said Xing Dongsheng, director of the Trademark Supervision Department of the Shanghai Industry and Commerce Administration.

He told participants that without the support and understanding of the rights' holders, protection is difficult to achieve.

The three-day conference is the first part of a cooperation agreement signed by the Shanghai IPR Administration and the American Education Foundation in May 2004.

Under the agreement, the city will join hands with the foundation to train 50 senior IPR experts in the United States by 2010. They will be chosen from local government departments, research institutions and universities.

"The training program will be a stimulus to the city's establishment of an IPR talent network," said Chen Zhixing, director of the Shanghai IPR Administration.

He said the 50 experts make up a small force considering the size of the metropolis, but the joint effort is a good beginning.

Shanghai has only 500 IPR professionals working in government departments, courts, universities and intermediary service agencies.

Ten percent of those are IPR judges in the local courts and 10 percent IPR teachers in the universities.

"We need to train more professionals as judges to handle the increasing number of IPR cases and as teachers to train more students," said Gu Yonghua, director of the Planning and Development Department of the Shanghai IPR Administration.

Gu said at the conference that local universities should train at least 2,300 IPR professionals by 2010 to meet the growing demand.

The conference brought together the voices of senior government officials, industry representatives, educators and legal experts from the United States and China.

"Their different perspectives will allow us to examine and seek solutions for IPR professional training courses in the future," Chen said.

Efforts will also be made to find solutions to some of the most pressing IPR issues affecting industries such as pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, information technology and entertainment, he said.

Keith Maskus, professor from University of Colorado, appreciated what Shanghai is doing to protect IPR from infringement, saying without good trademark protection, Chinese enterprises would be unable to develop in a healthy way.

"Protection will be an encouragement to creation," Maskus said.

He said it is very easy to imitate low-cost and low-scale products, but difficult to copy high-tech ones.

Maskus suggested Shanghai develop more high-tech products as a way to protect IPR since it has more advantages in this field than other parts of China.

(China Daily October 29, 2004)