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TREATMENT OF TRADEMARK CASES WITHOUT INDIVIDUAL POA
Article 9 Paragraph 1 of the Trademark Law provides that a trademark agent may be ap-pointed to file an application for the registration of a trademark and to handle all matters per-taining to a trademark. Article 10 Paragraph 1 of the same law provides that a trademark agent may perform all necessary acts in respect of matters pertaining to a trademark, except as re-stricted by the contract of appointment. How-ever, with regard to the powers of a patent agent, Article 12 of the Patent Law merely provides that a patent applicant may appoint a patent agent to file a patent application and handle patent-related matters on his behalf; the Patent Law does not define the specific extent of a patent agent's powers.
In past individual cases, the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) generally took the view that a trademark agent or patent agent need only pre-sent a single power of attorney detailing the matters he is empowered to deal with, to be permitted to handle affairs related to multiple trademarks or patents.
However, in a 2002 judgment, the Supreme Administrative Court held, based on the princi-ple of trademark cases being examined indi-vidually, that where an agent is appointed to handle trademark matters, a power of attorney must be presented to the trademarks authority in respect of each individual trademark case. This decision overturned the IPO's former practice in trademark cases.
Apart from the need for clarification as to whether the requirement for a separate power of attorney for each case also applies to patent agents, the issue is that of how an unknown number of pending cases should be handled if individual powers of attorney were not originally given for each case. At their July 2002 monthly meeting, the divisional chief judges of the Su-preme Administrative Court passed a resolution that in such cases, the original procedural defect could be corrected by ratification before the conclusion of the administrative relieves proce-dures.
In a recent judgment of the Taipei High Admin-istrative Court, and in a number of other cases heard by the same court involving similar pro-cedural defects, the judges cited the above July 2002 resolution, and allowed lawyers repre-senting the litigants to correct the original pro-cedural defects by ratification before the con-clusion of the administrative relieves procedures.