IPO Candidate Tudou Is Building Its Patent Portfolio For Future Growth, Promoting Chinese Creativity

With 90.1 million registered users, 

Tudou 土豆, which means potato, 

is no small potato. 

The site for investors 'Seeking Alpha' gives an analysis of the Chinese online video site Tudou.com 土豆网 (for which they use the symbol TUDO) in relation to its competitors, before it is going for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) at NASDAQ Stock Exchange in the US. The IPO was planned last November, but because of a quarrel between the founder and his ex-wife it was delayed. 

For the valuation of what a company is worth, and to valuate the price per share, one should take into account the IP portfolio of a firm. In case of technology firms such as this online video company patents play an extremely important role. They can be used for defensive or offensive purposes. Seeking Alpha took a  look at the intellectual property of the IPO candidate: "INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY -- TUDO owns one utility model patent in China relating to a unique search engine system, and is in the process of applying for 32 additional patents to protect core technologies with respect to online video distribution and search."

Read the analysis here.

Effective measure against copyright infringement: create copyrighted works
Huang Ying has an interesting China Daily article about how Tudou is supporting the creation of Chinese films and TV drama, read it here.

UPDATE: August 19, 2011 Can NASDAQ Fund Chinese Piracy?

Tom Cheredar of Venture Beat gives the update on the Tudou IPO: they raised 174 million US dollar at the NASDAQ, read more here.
Greg Pilarowski wrote on July 27, 2011 also for Venture Beat about how a possible Xunlei IPO could lead that Chinese piracy would be funded via NASDAQ, read here.

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China's Third Patent Amendment: Curb Your Enthousiasm

China's upcoming third amendment of its patent law has moved a lot of pens, or rather fingers, to write critiques and analyses.

Mr Timonthy J. Maier partner of Maier & Maier PLLC, a law firm in Alexandria Virginia (US) and blogger of Post-Grant gives a good overview of the most controversial paragraphs of the draft. These include articles 49, 50 and 74, read Mr Maier's article here.

Mr Thomas T. Moga of law firm Butzel Long, which is a member of the China Alliance (which includes two other US law firms: Armstrong Teasdale LLP, Michael Best & Friedrich LLP, and Canadian Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP and is combining its resources to support their clients in China), is looking whether the draft is compliant to the Agreement on Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property rights (TRIPs), read here.

Read the draft and the comments upon it by the International Chamber of Commerce the World Business Organization (ICC) here. The comments of the Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO) can be found here.

The Fédération Internationale Des Conseils En Intellectuele Propriété (FIDCI) has an elaborate power point presentation about the subject here.

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