The Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, referred to as the Paris Convention, was signed in Paris on March 20, 1883 and entered into force on July 7, 1884. The objects of the Paris Convention, that is, the scope of protection, are industrial property rights, including invention patents, utility models, industrial designs, trademarks, service marks, manufacturer names, goods marks or names of origin, and the prevention of unfair competition.
The basic purpose of the Paris Convention is to ensure that the industrial property rights of a member state are protected in all other member states. Together with the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, the Paris Convention constitutes the two “basic laws” for protecting economic “hard power” and cultural “soft power” worldwide. On March 19, 1985, China became a member of the Convention and the 96th member state of the Union.
Since its signing in 1883, the Paris Convention has been revised many times. The current text is the one revised in Geneva in February 1980. There are 30 articles in total, divided into 3 groups. Articles 1 to 12 are substantive articles, Articles 13 to 17 are administrative articles, and Articles 18 to 30 are about the accession, approval, withdrawal and acceptance of new member states, which are called “final articles”.
Due to the conflicts of interest and legislative differences among member states, the Paris Convention failed to formulate a unified industrial property law, but instead protected based on the domestic legislation of each member state. Therefore, it did not exclude the territoriality of the effectiveness of patent rights. While respecting the domestic legislation of each member state, the convention stipulates several basic principles that all member states must abide by in order to coordinate the legislation of each member state to make it consistent with the provisions of the convention.