Why Fruit Patents Matter | The Knock-On Effect #24 | Real Vision™
Does a surge in Chinese trademarks mean fruit could get a lot more tasty? Justine, Alex and Roger discuss how patents are transforming the apple industry and China’s shifting attitude towards intellectual property. Filmed on November 12, 2018.
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Why Fruit Patents Matter | The Knock-On Effect #24 | Real Vision™
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Transcript:
A surge in foreign trademarks means your fruit is about to get a lot more tasty.
Alex Rosenberg: So more trademarks in countries that aren't the US is going to equal more delicious fruit.
Yes, your fruit will get a lot more delicious as foreign trademarks increase. Let's get to it.
Welcome to The Knock-On Effect. This is where we start with the thing you know and end up in a strange place. I'm Justine Underhill, and joining us today we have our guest here who defies all labels, Alex Rosenberg.
Hi.
And we have in person a very special guest, the professor himself, Roger Hirst.
Roger Hirst: Good to be here again.
All right, now, actually both of you will be taking on the role of guesser this week. So I'd like you to try your hand at seeing how we get from trademarks to tasty produce.
Shall I have a go?
Yeah, I think so, professor.
So trademarks on-- there's going to be trademarks on a certain style of fruit, so bananas that are bent in a certain way.
OK.
And they're going to say, you can't have that sort of bent or that sort of round. So people have to come up with different varietals of bananas and apples that are off trademark, which allows people to say, I've got 20 different types of apples and four different types of bananas. So variety goes up, and flavors will go up because of that.
OK, Alex, you have a--
I'm going to guess that-- you know, sometimes you see these fruit combinations, like you get the pluots or the, you know, lobstercados, or something like that, which is lobster and avocado grown out of the ground.
What?
I made that up. But you see different combinations. And so perhaps you'll get to trademark
those combinations, and we'll get to have a plethora of--
Lobstercados.
Sure.
OK, well, that is far off. You are a little bit closer. We'll see where this goes.
OK.
You guys can get your grades at the very end.
OK, so we're going to start-- we say we start with the thing you know, but this is a little bit of a thing you might not know, which is trademarks, but specifically in China, our favorite place.
Your favorite place. My favorite place.
OK, so, basically, what's been going on is China's been having a huge push to trademark, specifically, the US patent and Trademark Office has been flooded in the past few years with Chinese applications, which is kind of something that you wouldn't expect.
So the Chinese companies looking to get US trademarks for stuff.
Yes, yes. So applications from China have grown more than 12-fold since 2013. 1 in every 9 trademark applications in the US is from a Chinese applicants, which actually came as a surprise to people in the patent office. They didn't know what was going on until they discovered that Chinese governments, municipalities, have actually been paying their citizens to trademark things in the US and trademark things abroad. So this has been a big push by the Chinese government. So in Shenzhen specifically, they pay citizens as much as $800 per registered trademark.
So are there just like Chinese people inventing random stuff?
Things-- I mean, some of it's-- they're trademarking things that probably shouldn't be
trademarked. But this is sort of part of a bigger push in China.
So they're not trying to clog up all the lawyers in the US to get them out of the way, because that's whats' going to happen.
There are some-- there have been some, if you want to go with nefarious reasons, people think they're doing it. That is one--
Not one here.