On April 25^th, 2012, the Sixth International Conference on the Intellectual Property Protection of High Technology—Industrial Design Protection of Graphical User Interface of Electronic Products kicked off in Beijing. The event presented a valuable opportunity to gain insights into current IP issues and the trend of IP protection in the high-tech area.

 

IT and telecom industries now see more than half of their value and revenue attributed to their IP assets. Increasing disputes and litigations involving their unique features like graphical user interfaces (GUI) sometimes threaten the fate of the whole company when such features constitute their main market value and require strategic R&D input. As jurisdictions around the world focus on promulgating new IP rules and IP law amendments to keep pace with advances in high technology, different stakeholders such as academia, industry, and legal societies were all attracted to the discussion, among which, the government officials from SIPO, MIIT, USPTO, JPO and EU, and industry leaders including Microsoft, Sony, Baidu, Huawei and ZTE delivered relevant speeches.

 

Horacio E.Guiérrez, Corporate Vice-President and Deputy General Counsel of Microsoft delivered a keynote speech titled the Design patent protection in an Era of Virtual Migration. He stressed that the design of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and other elements of electronic screens were rapidly gaining in importance. As a result, innovators in the technology sector need design patent protection for their GUIs, just as their counterparts in manufacturing long had relied upon design patent protection for the unique designs of physical products.