Business Question 

Many companies have faced a familiar frustration: their trademark portfolio is properly registered and well maintained, yet someone still manages to ride on the brand “legitimately” — not by using a similar trademark, but a similar company name, an imitative online store name, or a near-identical social media account. The company pulls out its trademark registration certificate to take action, only to find it carries no weight in this kind of scenario.

Why does someone still get away with riding on our brand, even though our trademark is properly registered? That is the question this installment sets out to answer. The answer lies in a fact easily overlooked: trademark law can only govern trademarks, but what a copycat uses to ride on your brand is often something else entirely. This article is not simply about how much the scope of protection has expanded — it is about how companies should choose the optimal path among trademark law, the Anti-Unfair Competition Law, domain name dispute procedures, and platform rules when confronting different types of brand free-riding. The adjustments to this group of provisions, together with the practical tool we introduce below, are meant to help companies think this through clearly.

  Legal Update 

The latter half of Chapter II (Articles 20 through 25) addresses the conflict scenarios most commonly encountered in trademark registration. Articles 20 (similarity examination), 21 (cross-class protection for well-known trademarks), and 23 (geographical indication protection) largely carry forward the logic of the current Law without substantive change, and companies may continue to apply their existing understanding of these provisions; we will not dwell on them here.

What genuinely warrants a company's attention are Articles 22 and 24, together with Article 63(3), which sits outside this chapter but is closely related.

Article 22 addresses bad-faith registration by an agent or representative: where an agent or representative registers its principal's trademark in its own name without authorization, the application is refused and use is prohibited. The new Law adds a further category to this provision: where an applicant, though not in a formal agency relationship with the trademark owner, knew of the trademark's existence based on a contract, business dealings, or other relationship, and nonetheless filed to register it first, the application will likewise be refused upon the trademark owner's objection. This meaningfully expands the scope of anti-preemption regulation from a narrow “agency relationship” to the considerably broader category of “knowledge arising from business dealings.”

Article 24 is the general provision protecting prior use, prohibiting bad-faith preemptive registration of a trademark already used by another party and having acquired a certain influence. This provision itself has changed little, but read together with the expanded Article 22, it signals that the protective net around a company's prior rights has been meaningfully tightened.

Article 63(3) is an easily overlooked but consequential expansion: under the current Law, a people's court's judicial determination of well-known trademark status is limited to trademark civil and administrative cases; the new Law extends this to unfair competition cases as well. It is worth noting that this does not mean a well-known trademark determination automatically follows from filing an unfair competition claim — judicial recognition of well-known status has always followed the principles of determination on an as-needed basis, case-specific effect, and passive recognition, meaning a court will only make such a determination where the case genuinely requires it and a party has affirmatively requested it. What the new Law expands is the category of cases in which this request may be raised, not the threshold for the determination itself. This means companies pursuing a copycat enterprise or brand free-rider now have an additional avenue through which to seek well-known trademark recognition — but whether that avenue succeeds will still depend on whether the particular case genuinely warrants such a determination.

  Practical Analysis 

Article 22's expansion from “agency relationship” to “knowledge arising from business dealings” reflects, in our view, a real shift in how companies actually do business: genuine traditional agency relationships — exclusive distribution agreements, formal trademark agency contracts — have become comparatively rare in commercial practice, replaced by looser and more varied forms of collaboration. OEM manufacturers, ODM design partners, cross-border e-commerce operators, and livestream sales partners may all gain deep familiarity with a brand's trademark over the course of a long-term relationship, without ever fitting the traditional definition of an “agent.” Had the law continued to confine anti-preemption protection to strict agency relationships, a substantial share of real-world bad-faith filings would have fallen outside its reach. By making “knowledge” rather than “status” the operative standard, the new Law brings the provision into line with how business collaboration has actually evolved — the practical upshot for companies is that the burden of proof, when challenging this type of bad-faith filing, will increasingly turn on whether the company can show the other party knew its trademark existed, rather than whether a formal agency relationship existed. This lower evidentiary bar is a substantive gain for rights holders.

As for Article 63(3), we believe this adjustment connects two avenues of recourse that had previously operated in relative isolation. Over the past several years, a large number of copycat disputes at the company-name or trade-name level have proven genuinely difficult to resolve through trademark law alone — because what the other party is using may not be a registered trademark at all, but a closely similar company name, in which case the Anti-Unfair Competition Law is the more appropriate basis for a claim, yet an unfair competition action has not, on its own, supported a separate claim for well-known trademark protection. By extending judicial recognition of well-known status into unfair competition cases, the new Law effectively connects “trademark protection” and “unfair competition protection,” two avenues that previously operated largely independently of one another, giving companies an additional possibility for invoking well-known trademark protection when confronting copycat conduct at the trade-name or domain-name level.

  Practical Impact 

The expansion of Article 22 has its most direct impact on a category of cases that previously fell into a genuine gap in available remedies: bad-faith registration by a long-term but non-traditional business partner.

Consider an illustrative scenario: a consumer electronics brand has long engaged a contract manufacturer to produce its products, with the relationship governed solely by a manufacturing agreement — no trademark agency or distribution agreement of any kind was ever signed. Over the course of the collaboration, the manufacturer gained deep exposure to the brand's trademark, packaging design, and even its customer channels. After the relationship ended, the manufacturer registered the brand's core trademark in China in its own name, intending to manufacture and sell the same products independently. Under the current Law, the brand owner faces a real obstacle in invoking Article 22 to challenge this registration — the manufacturer and the brand owner do not stand in a traditional “agency” or “representative” relationship, and such cases have previously had to fall back on the general prior-use protection in Article 24, which carries a comparatively higher evidentiary bar for showing the mark had “acquired a certain influence.” Once the new Law takes effect, the brand owner can argue directly that the manufacturer “knew” of the trademark's existence by virtue of the long-term collaboration, and invoke the expanded Article 22 to bring an opposition or invalidation action — a more direct evidentiary path that is also easier to satisfy. This is precisely the kind of substantive strengthening of remedies the new Law provides for bad-faith filings arising in non-traditional collaboration settings such as OEM manufacturing, ODM design, and e-commerce operation partnerships.

  GreRoyalt Observation 

In handling cross-border prior-rights disputes and copycat cases, we have repeatedly observed that when a company first encounters a suspected infringement lead, its instinct is to ask “is this infringement?” — but that question comes too early. What genuinely determines the right enforcement path, and how efficiently it proceeds, is not whether infringement has occurred, but exactly what the other party is using. Whether the free-riding involves a similar trademark, a similar company name, or a similar store name or domain calls for an entirely different optimal legal tool. Heading straight for a “trademark infringement” framing from the outset often means spending considerable time and resources on the wrong track.

On the strength of this view, we recommend that companies, upon receiving a suspected infringement lead, first run it through the Brand Conflict Matrix below as a first-step assessment, rather than jumping straight to evaluating infringement:

The value of this matrix lies not in its complexity, but in its speed — a company's in-house legal, marketing, or e-commerce operations staff can use it to make an initial call, within minutes of receiving a lead, on which direction to pursue, without needing to consult outside counsel just to determine the first step. In practice, many situations involve more than one type of conduct at once (for example, the other party may both have filed a similar trademark application and be using a similar store name), in which case a combined enforcement approach is usually warranted. The matrix is meant to indicate priority, not an exclusive choice.

  Practice Checklist 

✓  Distribute the Brand Conflict Matrix to in-house legal, marketing, and e-commerce operations staff as a first-step assessment tool for handling suspected infringement leads.

✓  Review recent OEM, ODM, and e-commerce operations partnerships for the risk that a partner with knowledge of your trademark may have preemptively registered it, and consider invoking the expanded relief under the new Article 22 where warranted.

✓  For copycat disputes arising at the trade-name or domain-name level, assess whether a claim for well-known trademark recognition can be raised alongside other claims, broadening the available avenues for relief.

In the next installment: “Is Non-Use Cancellation Becoming More Important? How Companies Should Actually Preserve Evidence of Trademark Use” — examining the reinforced genuine-use obligation, the practical application of the non-use cancellation rule, and how companies should systematically build a process for retaining and managing use evidence.

This article is provided for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice for any specific matter. Please consult qualified counsel regarding your particular circumstances.