Your Drawing Leaves the Room With the Quotation

What Actually Leaks, and When

Copying rarely starts with a factory deciding to steal a design. It starts with a quotation.

To quote accurately a factory needs the drawing, the material, the tolerances and the tooling concept, and often photographs of the market version. That package is the design. It travels by email, sits on a sales manager's laptop, gets forwarded to a tooling shop for a price, and is discussed with the customer who asked for something similar last month.

The exposure window is the enquiry stage, and it is at its widest when you are shopping a design across several suppliers to compare prices. Five quotations mean five copies of the drawing circulating in one industrial district, usually within a week of each other.

None of this requires bad faith. It requires only that a factory treat an unsolicited drawing as a market opportunity, which some do and some do not.

What an NDA Is Worth

A non-disclosure agreement is enforceable in China. It is also slow, expensive and hard to prove, which makes it a layer rather than a solution.

What an NDA does well is change the conversation. A factory that signs one and then asks for the drawing knows there is a document with its company seal on it, and that document is discoverable in a dispute. What it does poorly is stop a copy that has already been made, because proving that a competitor's product derives from your drawing requires evidence of access and substantial similarity, and that is a court case with expert witnesses.

Sign one, in Chinese, carrying the company seal rather than a signature alone, naming the legal entity that will actually see the files. Then behave as though it does not exist, which means not sending the one document that would hurt most.

Register First, Disclose Second

China awards design patents and trademarks to the first applicant, not the first user. That single rule reorders everything else.

If your product has a novel shape, file a Chinese design patent before you send the drawing to anybody. If it has a brand name, file the Chinese trademark in the classes you sell in before the first sample leaves the factory. Both filings are inexpensive relative to the cost of losing the right, and both can be made through the Chinese national system without a local company.

The reason to hurry is not the factory you are talking to. It is the third party who watches new products at trade fairs and files the trademark of anything that looks like it will sell. A registration filed six weeks after a fair can arrive after somebody else's.

Three Rights, Three Different Jobs

Buyers conflate these, and the confusion costs money.

• Design patent. Protects the appearance of a product: shape, pattern, colour combination. No substantive examination, so grant is relatively quick, and the term runs fifteen years from filing. It is the right instrument for a distinctive look.
• Trademark. Protects the name and the logo in named classes. Ten years, renewable. This is the registration that stops a copy being sold under your brand, and the one most often lost to a squatter.
• Copyright. Arises on creation and covers drawings, packaging artwork and photographs. Useful and free, and weaker in practice because proving ownership and copying takes more work than producing a registration certificate.

Utility features, the way something works rather than the way it looks, sit with invention or utility model patents, which involve examination and cost more. Most consumer products at a trade fair are protected by design and trademark, not by patents on function.

Who Owns the Mould

Tooling is where design protection becomes physical. A mould you paid for, sitting in a factory you have fallen out with, is a design in somebody else's hands.

Write the ownership into the purchase order: the mould is your property, it was paid for at a stated cost, it is held at the factory for your orders, and it is returnable or transferable on request. Photograph it, record its number, and ask for the tooling invoice in your name.

Chinese practice recognises mould ownership claims, and enforcement usually runs through negotiation rather than a court, because a factory holding a mould it does not own has little to gain by refusing a transfer it can bill for. The negotiation works far better when the paperwork exists.

Splitting the Specification

If a single supplier must not see the whole picture, split it. This is ordinary practice in categories where copying is fast.

Send the housing to one factory and the mechanism to another. Keep the final assembly and the firmware with a third party. Withhold the critical dimension, the material grade or the finishing process until an order is placed, and quote the part rather than the product. It costs coordination effort and some price, and it removes the scenario where one factory has everything needed to make the whole item.

What it does not do is protect a product that can be bought, opened and reverse engineered. For those, registration is the only real defence, because the copy will exist whether or not you sent a drawing.

Customs Recordal and Enforcement

China Customs runs an intellectual property recordal system. A registered design patent or trademark can be recorded with customs, and recorded rights give customs a basis to detain suspect export shipments at the border.

The mechanism matters because it acts on the exit rather than the entrance. A factory making copies for export is stopped at the port, where the goods are consolidated and visible, rather than in a workshop where proving production is harder.

Recordal requires the registration to exist first, which returns to the same order of operations: file, then record, then enforce. A rights holder with no registration has no recordal, and no recordal means customs has nothing to act on.

When Your Brand Is Already Taken

The scenario is common enough to check before you commit: a distributor, a former employee, or an unrelated party has already registered your brand in China, sometimes in the class you sell in, sometimes in adjacent classes to block you.

There are routes. An application can be opposed before registration, or cancelled afterwards on grounds of bad faith or non-use, and a prior user with genuine reputation can sometimes succeed. All of them take months and require evidence of use, which is why the file of dated invoices, packaging and advertising matters more than any single document.

The cheap option is a search before you launch. A Chinese trademark search by class costs little and answers the question that otherwise arrives as a cease-and-desist letter two years into a market.

A Working Order of Operations

File the trademark in the classes you sell in. File a design patent on anything with a distinctive appearance. Search the register for your brand before spending on packaging. Sign an NDA in Chinese with the entity that will see the files. Split the specification where the category copies fast. Write mould ownership into the order. Record the registered rights with customs once they grant.

None of these stops a determined copier, and together they change the economics: the copy has to be made without your files, sold without your brand, and exported past a customs system that has your registration on file.

What none of it replaces is the decision about who sees the drawing in the first place. The cheapest protection is still a shorter list of recipients.

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