Preface: You cannot understand the essence of global competition without understanding the patent system
I. This question will have to be answered sooner or later
In 2024, a Chinese lithium-battery company was sued for patent infringement in the United States. On the day the judgment was handed down, its owner sat in his office until three in the morning. He was not calculating the damages—he could afford to pay them. He was reviewing a question:
“Five years ago, when we entered the U.S. market, the legal team told me an FTO analysis would cost 800,000. I thought it was expensive and didn’t do it. Now we’ve paid 12 million in damages. That 800,000 back then wasn’t a cost—it was insurance.”
Meanwhile, another small and medium-sized enterprise spends hundreds of thousands or even over a million yuan every year filing new patents and maintaining old ones. Yet when it comes to enforcing its patents, it is forced into an awkward predicament: either the patent is invalidated, or the enforcement succeeds but yields little, to the point that patent enforcement becomes a "losing business."
The authenticity of these two stories is irrelevant—hundreds and thousands of Chinese companies experience the very same thing every year. What is truly worth asking is: why do Chinese enterprises—including those that are excellently managed and technologically leading—keep stepping into the same pitfall in the global intellectual-property game? And in some countries, why is the patent right not always as handy as they claim it to be?
The answer is not that they don’t understand the law. It is that they don’t understand "how the law came to be."
Patent law is not like traffic rules—red means stop, green means go, universally applicable everywhere. Patent law is the extension of a nation’s competitive strategy. When a country chooses to protect what, not to protect what, and to what extent to protect, has never been a purely legal or technical matter. It is a question of interest calculation:
– When Britain was still catching up with the technology of continental Europe, its patent law specifically opened the door for those who "introduced foreign methods of manufacture."
– When Switzerland was still one of the most backward industrial countries in Europe, it had no patent law—and for decades, it was perfectly content with not having one.
– When Japan realized its chemical industry needed room to imitate, it deliberately excluded chemical substances from patent protection, until 1975—by which time Japan’s chemical industry was already the world’s second largest.
These are not historical accidents; they are a law that has been repeatedly verified. All the international intellectual-property disputes we discuss today—Section 301, the TRIPS Agreement, compulsory licensing, standard-essential patents—have their underlying logic pointing to the very same question:
Who is catching up, who is leading, and who is exporting the rules.
If you fail to understand this law, you will never comprehend the real chessboard of the global intellectual-property game.
II. What this series answers
"Zhihai Yida: A History of Intellectual Property" is a series of studies launched by Hefei Zhihai Yida Patent Agency. The entire series consists of sixty-nine articles, divided into six parts, attempting to answer a central inquiry:
How does the protection strength of a country’s patent system evolve as its relative position on the global technology ladder changes? What does this law mean for Chinese enterprises?Which stage are we at, and what does it mean for enterprises, and for agencies? What is the historical mission of intellectual-property professionals in this era?
Part One: The Origins (5 articles)
Why was the first patent law born in Venice in 1474? Not for the pretty label we later attached to it—"incentivizing innovation"—but to bring the inventions of foreign artisans into the service of municipal works. What about England’s Statute of Monopolies of 1624? On the surface it restrained the royal prerogative, but in essence it institutionalized the "introduction of foreign technology."
The Origins part aims to break a myth: the original intent of the patent system was never the pure ideal of intellectual property, but a calculation of national interest.
Part Two: The Dark Side (22 articles)
This is the evidentiary cornerstone of the series. We dug deep, country by country, into the "dark-side history" of the patent systems of eight developed countries—how Britain used letters patent to poach Flemish artisans; how the United States, for 46 years without examining patents, mass-"legally copied" European inventions; how Germany deliberately left chemicals unprotected to let Bayer and BASF rise; how Switzerland industrialized without a patent law; how the Netherlands voluntarily abolished its patent system in 1869…
Each article comes with a complete timeline and verifiable sources. Our purpose is not moral judgment, but to reveal an institutional fact: all the developed countries that today emphasize intellectual-property protection were once the biggest "patent rogues."
Part Three: The Game (8 articles)
What happened after various countries turned from catch-up players into leaders? Who pushed for, and who resisted, the Paris Convention of 1883? How did the 1994 TRIPS Agreement tie intellectual property into the global trading system? How exactly does the U.S. Section 301 operate? How does India’s Section 3(d) resist from within the rules? Was the Doha Declaration a victory for developing countries or a compromise?
The Game part pulls the camera back—it is not the story of any single country, but how countries play this card game at the table.
Part Four: China (7 articles)
China only established its patent system in 1985—511 years after Venice. But China’s path is unique: it did not grow up in an environment of zero external pressure. Just four years after its first Patent Law took effect in 1985, the barrel of the U.S. Section 301 was already aimed at it.
The China part takes China’s own institutional building as its main axis, dissecting in detail the four stages from inception, transplantation, and accumulation to proactive play. External pressure is the backdrop, not the protagonist. The protagonist is China—an institutional builder with agency.
Part Five: Strategy (6 articles)
Once the history is told and the law found, what follows is the part of putting it into practice.
The core logic of the Strategy part is this: patent strategy should not be divided by "whether you are a large or a small enterprise," but by "which country your product is to be sold in, and what stage of protection that country is currently at." We provide the complete strategic framework from zero-protection markets to outward-pressure-type markets, as well as a resource-allocation plan for multi-market portfolio enterprises.
Part Six: Outlook (4 articles)
Can AI be an inventor? If the world splits into two patent systems, what should enterprises do? Where will China’s patent system go in the next decade? Will the profession of patent agent be replaced by AI?
Questions without definitive answers must also be faced honestly.
III. Different readers, different entry points
This series is not a textbook to be read in order. Different readers should have different entry paths:
Corporate legal counsel and decision-makers: it is recommended to start with the Strategy part (articles 43–48) and find the strategy corresponding to your target market. When you encounter a historical judgment you don’t understand, flip back to the Dark Side part or the China part to read the complete story of that country.
Patent agents: it is recommended to start with the Dark Side part (articles 6–27) and the China part (articles 36–42). These are the hard-core content of institutional analysis; reading them will give you a fundamental understanding of "why the rules are the way they are today."
Entrepreneurs and students: start with the Origins part (articles 1–5). Before entering those complex great-power games, first see how this system was originally born.
Readers interested in international relations: the Game part (articles 28–35) and the Outlook part (articles 49–52) are the core. Inside, you will see the complete foundational framework of today’s global intellectual-property conflicts.
IV. How we wrote this
This work began with a simple intuition—the path of "weak protection → strong protection" did not seem unique to China. Later, systematic academic support was found in Ha-Joon Chang’s "Kicking Away the Ladder," and finer-grained historical evidence was seen in Eric Schiff’s classic study of the Netherlands’ patent-free period.
Our method is simple:
1. Historical facts first. The core narrative of each article is based on verifiable primary sources: the original patent laws of each country (via the WIPO Lex database), scholarly literature (JSTOR, Google Scholar), official archives and statistics (USPTO, EPO, KIPO annual reports), and the texts of international treaties (the Paris Convention, TRIPS, the Doha Declaration).
2. Cross-verification. Any "historical legend"—such as "Switzerland industrialized by copying German chemical technology"—will not enter the main text until it is confirmed by more than two independent sources.
3. Strategy-oriented. The goal of this series is not academic publication, but to help enterprises make decisions. The purpose of historical analysis is not nostalgia, but to find the law. Once the law is found, the next step is to tell readers: this is what you should do today.
V. To the reader
As a patent agent, this is something I have long wanted to do: what on earth is the purpose of the patent? Does the patent ultimately promote technological development, or hinder it?
The daily work of an agent is very concrete: writing claims, responding to office actions, conducting FTO. These are the "techniques."
But every time I see an enterprise make a wrong layout decision because it cannot read the direction of the system—for example, over-filing in a weak-protection country and wasting budget, or rashly entering a strong-protection country without doing an FTO—I think: what this industry lacks is not only technique, but the "dao" (the way).
"Dao" is understanding the system.
Understanding where the system came from, why it is the way it is, pushed by whom into this shape, and where it will go next.
This series is our attempt at this problem. If the cooks of Sybaris knew that two thousand years later, humanity has come so far on the patent system—from one-year monopolies on cooking recipes to global standard-essential-patent wars—they would probably be amazed too.
And all of this began with that vote in the Venetian Senate on March 19, 1474.
116 in favor, 10 against, 3 abstaining.
On that day, the modern intellectual-property system was born. At its beginning, it was not for "incentivizing innovation," and even now, it is not entirely for "incentivizing innovation" either.
Why? It is not for "incentivizing innovation." We explain this answer in detail in the very first article of Part One.