Greetings as a new member of RCLIP (Masabumi Suzuki)
Posted on 2023年4月17日, By RCLIP
Since April 2023, he has been a faculty member in charge of intellectual property law at Waseda University's Faculty of Law, and has also become a member of the Institute for Intellectual Property Law (RCLIP). The structure of RCLIP for the new fiscal year will be led by former Director Ryu Takabayashi as an advisor, and Professor Tatsuhiro Ueno will be appointed as the new Director. Professor Rademacher and I will be the Deputy Directors. However, since the new Director Ueno has said that he would like to make the system more jointly managed compared to the previous year, I intend to be proactively involved in the management of RCLIP together with Director Ueno and Deputy Director Rademacher, rather than supporting Director Ueno. I would like to sincerely ask for the further understanding and support of all parties involved in the activities of RCLIP.
Since this is my first greeting, I would like to introduce myself a little.
Just as former Director Takabayashi became a faculty member at Waseda University after serving as a judge for nearly 20 years, I myself made a major change of direction in the first and second half of my life as a member of society. Specifically, after graduating from university, he first became a national civil servant and spent 21 years as an administrative officer at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (until January 2001, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry). After that, in the spring of 2002, he became a faculty member in charge of intellectual property law at the Graduate School of Law, Nagoya University, and retired from Nagoya University in March 2023.
During my time at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, I worked in a variety of fields, but in particular, I was involved in intellectual property policy and trade policy for the last 10 years. In terms of intellectual property policy, he held the post of Director of the Intellectual Property Policy Office, where he was in charge of the 2001 revision of the Unfair Competition Prevention Act, measures against counterfeit products, the intellectual property system for the Internet, and the examination of international intellectual property litigation. He was also responsible for bilateral trade issues with the United States and Canada, as well as negotiations and dispute settlement in the WTO. In particular, I was impressed by his work with the United States over disputes over automobiles and photographic films, negotiations on the accession of China and Taiwan to the WTO, and the WTO Ministerial Conference in Doha.
I changed from an administrative officer to a university professor when I was the head of the Intellectual Property Policy Office, when my old friend Professor Michiyo Hamada of Nagoya University (former member of the Japan Fair Trade Commission and currently professor emeritus at Nagoya University) asked me to give an intensive lecture on intellectual property law. In fact, it was difficult to prepare for an intensive lecture that lasted several hours while working as the head of the office, but Professor Shigeo Takakura (currently Professor Emeritus of Meiji University) helped me at that time. At that time, Dr. Takakura was the head of the General Affairs Department of the Japan Patent Office, and he was in a position to act as a counterpart to me on the Japan Patent Office. In addition, Prof. Takakura also gave an intensive lecture on intellectual property law at Kyoto University while he was busy, and he generously allowed me to use the materials for his lecture. The intensive lectures at Nagoya University were helped by Professor Takakura's materials (of course, I made my own modifications), and it seemed that I was at a passing level, and after that, I was hired as the first professor of intellectual property law at Nagoya University. The reason why I have been able to serve as a university faculty member to this day is thanks to Professor Hamada and Professor Takakura. Incidentally, Director Tatsuhiro Ueno attended a lecture by Professor Takakura when he was a graduate student at Kyoto University.
It would be impossible to write about my time at Nagoya University as I thought of it, so here I would like to write about two items that may lead to RCLIP's future activities. First, I made efforts to build an international network with overseas researchers, and second, I made efforts to educate international students.
First, when I was working at Nagoya University, I was fortunate enough to receive a relatively large Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research, so I made an effort to participate in overseas research groups and invite foreign researchers. Thanks to this, I was able to get to know and network with many researchers in Asia, Europe and the United States. For example, the series "Annotated Leading Cases in Major Asian Jurisdictions" (published in each field of patents, copyrights, and trademarks) in which researchers from Asian countries introduce their country's major judicial precedents, and "Patent Remedies and Complex Products: Toward a Global Consensus" (published by Cambridge University Press and also available in an open access version) is the result of such efforts.
Second, Nagoya University's Graduate School of Law has been working on international student education for quite some time, including a doctoral program in English. During my tenure at Nagoya University, I was fortunate enough to host many outstanding international students. The international students he taught came from a variety of countries, mainly Southeast Asia and China, but also Europe, Turkey, the United States, and South America. Many of them have returned to their home countries to pursue intellectual property or some kind of professional occupation. Many of them have become researchers. Others are diplomats and other people who work in charge of the country.
The international network mentioned above is extremely important to me, and I hope to make use of it in the activities of RCLIP in the future. In fact, one of the main reasons why I considered fortunate to be able to continue working at Waseda University and RCLIP when I retired from Nagoya University was that I thought that I would be able to expand and strengthen such a network rather than nullify it. Needless to say, RCLIP has always been the most advanced international activity in Japan, but fortunately, there are many aspects of the network that I have built that do not overlap with the activities of RCLIP so far, so I hope that it will be meaningful for us and for people overseas to be associated with RCLIP.
That's it, the self-introduction had become long. In the future, I would like to contribute through specific activities. I would like to conclude my opening remarks by asking readers once again for their support of the new RCLIP.
SUZUKI Masabumi (Professor, Faculty of Law, Waseda University)
