Enterprises with frequent infringements in food machinery industry need to strengthen their awarenes

In the food industry, there was a dispute between Wang Lao-ji-ga-duobao's red pot and Daoxiangcun's trademark. Various kinds of disputes often lasted for decades. Although less attention has been paid to food, there are many infringements on the appearance, trademarks, instructions and functions of food machinery and equipment.

First of all, the infringement of equipment function, about ten years ago, someone invented "a rotary food rounding device" and "a multi-head stuffing device" and then applied for a patent. Later, it was found that the TY400 high-speed Tangyuan machine sold by a company in Chengdu had these two patented technologies, but it was not licensed. This enables the Chengdu enterprise to sell such equipment at a very low price, disrupting the market order and infringing the patentee's patent rights. The patentee then took the Chengdu enterprise to court.

Let's talk about the disputes caused by the equipment description. Earlier, a food manufacturer in Lushun, Dalian, filed a patent application for its "food pulping machine", which has been retained by the patentee. However, it was found that the "homogeneous ice cream pulping and disinfection machine" produced by Shenyang enterprises had the same function and effect as the patented products, and even the instructions were the same. It was found that the equipment of homogeneous ice-cream pulping disinfector did not constitute infringement and belonged to different commodities from food pulping machine. However, the use of "food pulping machine" product instructions, and in accordance with the "food pulping machine" product instructions for publicity, was sentenced to stop the use of product instructions.

Just as there are both "Kang Shifu" and "Kang Shuai Fu" in food, there are also such appearances in the food machinery and equipment industry. For example, there is a beverage packaging machinery enterprise in Guangzhou, which is well-known as a listed company with R&D centers in the industry. In recent years, there have been frequent intellectualization activities, attracting people's attention. However, Taizhou Huangyan also quietly appeared the same trademark enterprises, and highlighted the trademark in various exhibitions, causing confusion to consumers, and was sentenced to stop using the trademark.

In addition, enterprises have been repeatedly prosecuted for infringement. At the beginning of this century, a machinery company in Shanghai hired the technical section chief of another food machinery manufacturing enterprise to produce and sell "Monorail Mooncake Automatic Forming Machine" and "Double Barrel Mooncake Pie Quantitative Machine". The product is very similar to the equipment that it participated in in the production in the original enterprise. The court held that although the design principles and mechanical structures of the two equipment were similar, they only had to pay for the use of the equipment because of the particularity of the equipment in the transmission and other parts. In the following years, the machinery company in Shanghai copied the invention patent of a Japanese automation company, the device for cutting the surface of spherical food, which was decided by the court to stop the infringement and compensate for the economic losses and reasonable expenses.

Frequent incidents of safeguarding the rights of food machinery and equipment manufacturers show that many food machinery and equipment enterprises in China do not have enough respect for other people's intellectual property rights. In addition, the illegal cost is relatively low in terms of profit, so the phenomenon of copying patented technology, trademarks and equipment functions at will occurs from time to time. As a result, there are many homogeneous devices in the current market, and many of them have almost the same appearance and color. The introduction of devices on the network platform is almost the same, causing confusion to equipment buyers. In the short run, this phenomenon brings huge profits to infringement enterprises, but in the long run, the phenomenon of "a big copy of equipment under the world" will evolve into a price war. Enterprises can only attract consumers at low prices, which will drag down the development of enterprises and even the whole industry.

At present, many policies of our country have been issued to protect the patents developed by enterprises. They not only include the corresponding protection mechanism for equipment entities under the line, but also stipulate the standards of enforcement and punishment of intellectual property rights in the process of e-commerce, so as to protect the intellectual property rights of enterprises in an all-round way. As can be seen from the above examples, these patent-applying enterprises have safeguarded their rights through legal weapons. To put an end to the infringement of food machinery industry requires not only the efforts of the government and enterprises with intellectual property rights, but also the restraint of infringement enterprises. It is believed that in the future, with the gradual improvement of patent-related laws and regulations, more enterprises in the food machinery industry will attach importance to patent property rights and jointly create a good market environment.