Patent protection to safeguard innovation

While working closely with partners around the world to lead in innovation, technology companies also need to help them protect their intellectual property, according to Huawei's vice-president.

Technology companies are no longer just a dozen titans. Instead, there are countless small and medium-sized enterprises in the sector from every corner of the world, and Huawei has been working with them to make customized solutions, which the company is very proud of, Fan Zhiyong, vice-president and head of the intellectual property and legal affairs department at Huawei Technologies, said on Monday.

"Our engineers in China will not be effective in writing a program to manage traffic in Sao Paulo. That must be done by some Brazilian software developers. We are pretty good at providing advanced hardware and artificial intelligence models to make their job possible. Digitalization of industries requires global innovation. There's no alternative," Fan said while delivering a speech at Vision China in Wuhan, Hubei province.

The event was themed "Leading to the Future with Technological Innovation".

The globalization of innovation has changed the landscape of intellectual property protection, he said at the event jointly held by China Daily and the Wuhan People's Government.

"As Huawei shares its technologies with the community of 4.6 million developers globally, protecting the company's intellectual property is of paramount importance. However, what I recognize becoming more challenging and important is that our local developers must be able to protect their intellectual property too," he added.

He added that many of those companies are startups that have fewer resources and are vulnerable to intellectual property infringement, but they can be based anywhere in the world. If their work is copied by their competitors, they would have no future, and Huawei would have no future.

"In the past, protecting intellectual property was mainly about a few big and developed countries, where the largest technology companies are. But now, intellectual property protection must be enforced globally," he said.

China now has specialized courts for intellectual property disputes, administrative proceedings designed to adjudicate such disputes in three months, and mediation centers throughout the country. And because of the country's continuous improvements in intellectual property protection, many advanced technologies have been developed in China, Fan said.

"My company took a chance and became a leading technology company, and we are not alone in China. In this new world of global innovation, the same success can take place in any country where there's good intellectual property protection," he said.