Shanghai will take the lead in the country to set up an intellectual property rights complaint center soon to better help IPR owners protect their rights, officials revealed yesterday.

The center will accept complaints and transfer cases to relative administrations. It will also monitor the handling of the cases.

If a case is delayed, the center will join in to find out the reason and organize the involved departments to study the case so that each complaint can be dealt with seriously, said Liu Minhong, a division chief of the Shanghai Intellectual Property Administration.

"It will offer more convenience to IPR owners because they can lodge complaints no matter what. Otherwise, IPR owners must first know what kind of violations are involved and approach different departments because each has its own specialty," Liu said.

The channels to accept complaints in different government agencies are still available and the center will coordinate with the agencies, officials added.

Meanwhile, the Shanghai Intellectual Property Service Center yesterday joined hands with the Shanghai Dragon Corp -- a public-listed company dealing mainly with textiles -- to unveil its first patent information cooperation center.

"We hope to set up more such cooperation centers with enterprises," said Li Yaoting, director of the Shanghai Intellectual Property Service Center.

Such centers will provide patent information to help local companies, particularly small and medium-sized units which do not have the resources to have their own IPR units, officials said.

Li said the new center will provide free, timely and specific international patent information to Shanghai Dragon, adding that local firms can also apply to establish such patent information relationship with the center.

Last year, the local industrial and commercial administration dealt with 652 cases of foreign trademark violations, accounting for 58.8 percent of the total trademark infringement cases in the city, according to official statistics released at an annual meeting yesterday to report local IPR protection achievements to foreign consulates and enterprises.

(Shanghai Daily April 26, 2006)