China is quickly becoming a global leader in intellectual property protection and enforcement. In 2015 China’s courts accepted 109,386 civil IP cases, +6% over previous year, compared to a total of 14,500 IP-related litigations in the USA. And since 2014, new specialized IP courts have been opened in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. More recently statutory damages for copyright and trademark infringements have been increased five-fold, up to 5 million RMB.

China as the land of copycats is definitely a dead stereotype.

In this rapidly changing scenario, Bernstein is proud to announce a partnership with UniTrust, the only official Chinese timestamping authority. Bernstein users will be able to secure their IP assets with an official Chinese timestamp along with certificates leveraging the most open and decentralized public registry: the Bitcoin blockchain.

Bernstein and UniTrust will explore a commercial partnership to bring Bernstein solutions for intellectual property protection to the Chinese market. A Chinese version of Bernstein web application will be developed to serve companies, universities and research institutions.

Bernstein will introduce to China a unique way of creating digital records for IP assets on multiple registration platforms, both decentralized and centralized. Moreover, IP assets will remain perfectly private, never shared with any third party, and conveniently accessible in an encrypted data repository.