Registration of patents in China. Why are 90% of them useless?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

An investigation by the Bloomberg news agency showed that China, which has led the world in the number of patents granted since 2010, is largely engaged in mass registrations. In pursuit of quantitative indicators in the PRC, everyone is patented, and most of these "inventions" do not make sense.

Eight years ago, China, overtaking Japan, came out on top in the world in terms of the number of registered national patents. Since then, the PRC has held the lead. For example, in 2016, Chinese inventors filed 1.2 million national patents. In second place that year was the United States with 295, 3 thousand patents, followed by Japan (260, 2 thousand) and South Korea (163, 4 thousand patents). Moreover, the number of patents in China is growing at an unprecedented rate. Last year, in the PRC, inventors were already given 1.8 million certificates.

However, it should be borne in mind that, unlike international patents, national ones are much easier to issue. In China, these rules are extremely simplified, and the registration fee is affordable.

As Bloomberg found out, there are three types of patents in the PRC. The first is the documents for real inventions, which are drawn up after careful checks and, as a rule, have real commercial value. The second is the patenting of the so-called utility model. In this case, there are already much fewer real technological innovations. Finally, the third category is design patents for various products.

Patents for inventions make up 23% of their total number, utility models - 53%, design - 24%. In the second and third categories, Chinese patents protect know-how for 10 years, and from the second five-year period, the fee for maintaining a patent increases significantly.

As it turned out, 91% of design patents are not renewed by their owners after the first five years

That is, nine out of ten Chinese product design patents are completely useless "inventions" that are filed for show. In the case of utility models, after the first five years, 61% of owners refuse to protect a patent, and only 37% of patent holders stop paying for the first category (invention).

An example of a Chinese design patent is the shape of a soda bottle, and a utility model has a sliding gesture to unlock a smartphone

Wang Xiang, head of the Orrick’s China law firm, notes that in most cases Chinese patents are literally copied American ones. In fact, these are the costs of the planned economy of the PRC. After Chinese President Xi Jinping announced the launch of the Made in China 2025 program, Chinese business as if on command began to prove the country's technological superiority. First of all, this is expressed in the patenting of everything in a row.

In addition, Chinese companies are receiving patents en masse in pursuit of tax breaks and government subsidies. They are provided only to technology companies, which register pseudo-inventions in order to prove their belonging to the world of high technologies. For example, in Hainan province, high-tech companies are entitled to a regional subsidy of 500,000 yuan ($ 72,637) per year.

Another indicator by which China has overtaken the West is the number of scientific publications. Experts believe that given the scientific papers published in China itself, and those. written by Chinese scientists living abroad, Chinese authors already own a third of all exact science publications in the world. True, the quality of Chinese scientific publications is still much lower than, for example, the work of their American colleagues.

President's visit

So, in November 1963, Kennedy arrived in Texas. This trip was planned as part of the preparatory campaign for the 1964 presidential election. The head of state himself noted that it is very important for him to win in Texas and Florida. In addition, Vice President Lyndon Johnson was a local and the travel to the state was emphasized.

But the representatives of the special services were afraid of the visit. Literally a month before the president's arrival, Adlai Stevenson, the US representative to the UN, was attacked in Dallas. Earlier, during one of Lyndon Johnson's performances here, he was booed by a crowd of … housewives. On the eve of the President's arrival, leaflets with the image of Kennedy and the inscription "Wanted for Betrayal" were posted around the city. The situation was tense, and troubles awaited. True, they thought that demonstrators with placards would take to the streets or throw rotten eggs at the president, no more.

Local authorities were more pessimistic. In his book The Assassination of President Kennedy, William Manchester, a historian and journalist who chronicled the assassination attempt at the request of the President's family, writes: “Federal Judge Sarah T. Hughes feared incidents, Attorney Burfoot Sanders, senior Justice Department official in this part of Texas and the vice president’s spokesman in Dallas told Johnson’s political adviser Cliff Carter that given the city’s political atmosphere, the trip seemed "inappropriate." The city officials had trembling knees from the very beginning of this trip. The wave of local hostility towards the federal government had reached a critical point, and they knew it."

But the pre-election campaign was approaching, and they did not change the presidential travel plan. On November 21, a presidential plane landed at the airport of San Antonio (Texas' second most populous city). Kennedy attended Air Force Medical School, went to Houston, spoke at the university there, and attended a Democratic Party banquet.

The next day, the President went to Dallas. With a difference of 5 minutes, the vice president's plane arrived at Dallas Love Field airport, and then Kennedy's. At about 11:50 am, the motorcade of the first persons moved towards the city. The Kennedys were in the fourth limousine. In the same car with the President and the First Lady were US Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman, Texas Governor John Connally and his wife, agent William Greer was driving.

Three shots

It was originally planned that the motorcade would travel in a straight line on Main Street - there was no need to slow down on it. But for some reason, the route was changed, and the cars drove along Elm Street, where cars had to slow down. In addition, on Elm Street, the motorcade was closer to the educational store, from where the shooting was carried out.

Shots rang out at 12:30. Eyewitnesses took them either for the claps of a cracker, or for the sound of the exhaust, even the special agents did not immediately find their bearings. There were three shots in total (although even this is controversial), the first was Kennedy wounded in the back, the second bullet hit the head, and this wound became fatal. Six minutes later, the motorcade arrived at the nearest hospital, at 12:40 the president died.

The prescribed forensic medical research, which had to be done on the spot, was not carried out. Kennedy's body was immediately sent to Washington.

Workers at the training store told police that the shots were fired from their building. Based on a series of testimonies, an hour later, Police Officer Tippit attempted to detain warehouse worker Lee Harvey Oswald. He had a pistol with which he shot Tippit. As a result, Oswald was still captured, but two days later he also died. He was shot by a certain Jack Ruby while the suspect was being taken out of the police station. Thus, he wanted to "justify" his hometown.

So, by November 24, the president was assassinated, and so was the prime suspect. Nevertheless, in accordance with the decree of the new President Lyndon Johnson, a commission was formed, headed by the Chief Justice of the United States of America Earl Warren. There were seven people in total. For a long time, they studied the testimony of witnesses, documents, and in the end they concluded that a lone killer had attempted to assassinate the president. Jack Ruby, in their opinion, also acted alone and had exclusively personal motives for the murder.

Under suspicion

To understand what happened next, you need to travel to New Orleans, the hometown of Lee Harvey Oswald, where he last visited in 1963. On the evening of November 22, an altercation broke out at a local bar between Guy Banister and Jack Martin. Banister ran a small detective agency here, Martin worked for him. The reason for the quarrel had nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination, it was a purely industrial conflict. In the heat of the argument, Banister pulled out his pistol and hit Martin in the head with it several times. He shouted: "Will you kill me the way you killed Kennedy?"

The phrase aroused suspicion. Martin, who was admitted to the hospital, was interrogated, and he said that his boss Banister knew a certain David Ferry, who, in turn, knew Lee Harvey Oswald quite well. Further, the victim claimed that Ferry convinced Oswald to attack the president using hypnosis. Martin was considered not entirely normal, but in connection with the assassination of the president, the FBI worked out every version. Ferry was also interrogated, but the case did not receive any further progress in 1963.

… Three years have passed

Ironically, Martin's testimony was not forgotten, and in 1966 New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison reopened the investigation. He collected testimony that confirmed that the Kennedy assassination was the result of a conspiracy involving former civil aviation pilot David Ferry and businessman Clay Shaw. Of course, a few years after the murder, some of this testimony was not entirely reliable, but still Garrison continued to work.

He was hooked on the fact that a certain Clay Bertrand appeared in the report of the Warren Commission. Who he is is unknown, but immediately after the murder, he called New Orleans lawyer Dean Andrews and offered to defend Oswald. Andrews, however, remembered the events of that evening very poorly: he had pneumonia, a high temperature and he took a lot of drugs. However, Garrison believed that Clay Shaw and Clay Bertrand were one and the same person (later Andrews admitted that he generally gave false testimony regarding Bertrand's call).

Shaw, meanwhile, was a famous and respected figure in New Orleans. A war veteran, he ran a successful trade business in the city, participated in the public life of the city, wrote plays that were staged throughout the country. Garrison believed that Shaw was part of a group of arms dealers who were aiming to bring down the Fidel Castro regime. Kennedy's rapprochement with the USSR and the lack of a consistent policy against Cuba, according to his version, became the reason for the assassination of the president.

In February 1967, the details of this case appeared in the New Orleans States Item, it is possible that the investigators themselves organized the "leak" of information. A few days later, David Ferry, who was considered the main link between Oswald and the organizers of the assassination attempt, was found dead at his home. The man died of a cerebral hemorrhage, but the strange thing was that he left two notes of confused and confused content. If Ferry had committed suicide, then the notes could be considered dying, but his death did not look like a suicide.

Despite shaky evidence and evidence against Shaw, the case was brought to trial, and hearings began in 1969. Garrison believed that Oswald, Shaw, and Ferry had conspired in June 1963, that there were several who shot the president, and that the bullet that killed him was not the one fired by Lee Harvey Oswald. Witnesses were summoned to the trial, but the arguments presented did not convince the jury. It took them less than an hour to reach a verdict: Clay Shaw was acquitted. And his case remained in history as the only one brought to trial in connection with the Kennedy assassination.

Elena Minushkina