【Research Center for the Legal System of Intellectual Property】

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Comparative Law Research and Management of the Database Project - Miscellaneous Thoughts

RA Yuka Aoyagi

At the end of 2005, I had a wonderful opportunity to listen to the lecture by Professor Masao Ohki who is specialized in Comparative Law. The lecture was made to happen by Institute of Comparative Law, Waseda University. Professor Ohki's words were full of his passion to Comparative Law. I was so impressed that I could not help feeling I was fortunate to have such an opportunity. One of his messages in the lecture was a request to students and researchers to study at least two foreign laws somehow because it was not enough to study Japan Law and one foreign law for Comparative Law research.

Currently the IP related precedents DB project that the RCLIP is working on have already started in China, Thailand, Korea, Indonesia, Taiwan and Vietnam. I am responsible for Indonesia and Taiwan of those countries and seeing differences and similarities between these two countries. The enforcement of IP Law in each country is quite different because each country is at the different stage of economic development. I will pass this respect to the seminars organized for presenting the result of the DB project, but I would like to briefly introduce some differences that I experienced.

First of all, what two countries have in common is recognition of the importance of IP and cooperative manner to contribute through establishing the DB. Compared with these similarities, the most impressive difference between two is a sense of time to fulfill tasks. To begin with, the composition of the team is different. However, the composition is also distinctive. Taiwan has an agile team consisting of lawyer, researcher and judge. The team is implementing ahead of the schedule. On the other hand, Indonesia set up the team of judges and cooperating lawyers within the Supreme Court. This team's progress is relatively slow and the project is moving forward, having the confirmation of supervisors. I have to get accustomed to various differences like this to implement the project.

It is a long way short of studying Comparative Law, but I could catch a glimpse of cultural differences of these two countries as some comparative shapes by doing the same project in two countries at the same time. (It must be more interesting to add the stories by the persons who are responsible for other countries.) This is how I think of my experience in the project in the light of Professor Ohki's lecture. In short, I am assuming his words about two foreign laws means that it is not enough to know only one foreign country and we can take an objective view only when we compare the one country with other foreign country. (In my further thought, here I just only refer to the possibility of difficulty to study laws in two foreign countries because it is already fully difficult to implement a project in two countries.)