China Registered Your Brand Before You Did: How First-to-File Works

Two Logics That Are Easy to Confuse

Most founders we work with intuitively believe something simple: "I created the brand, I use it — so it's mine." In the US that intuition is largely justified. American law recognizes rights arising from actual use of a mark in commerce, and even without federal registration the first user holds a certain position.

China works differently. There the principle is first-to-file — whoever files first wins. Trademark rights go not to whoever first coined the name or started selling under it, but to whoever first filed an application with the patent office. Your years of using the brand in another country mean almost nothing under this logic.

The difference looks academic — right up until the moment it costs money. And it costs money often.

Trademark Squatting: Someone Else's Brand as a Commodity

From the first-to-file principle a distinct, well-established phenomenon has grown — trademark squatting, registering other people's brands in your own name. Individuals and small companies track promising foreign marks — through trade shows, supplier catalogs, marketplace listings, social media — and file applications for those names in China before the real owner arrives.

What follows is predictable. When a founder finally decides to enter the Chinese market or simply set up manufacturing, it turns out the brand is already taken. And the one who took it is willing to accommodate — for a buyout. Sometimes the sums run into thousands of dollars, sometimes considerably more.

Let's call it what it is: formally the squatter often acts within the law — they filed first, and the system rewards exactly that. China is tightening its response to bad-faith filings, but the underlying first-to-file principle remains. Counting on the law to sort it out for you is not a plan.

Who Is Actually at Risk

There's a common misconception: "we don't sell in China, so this doesn't concern us." In practice the risk appears long before you enter the Chinese market.

If you order manufacturing in China. Your brand shows up in correspondence with the factory, in specifications, on packaging, in shipping documents. Those are exactly the points through which the name becomes known in advance. A separate and painful situation is when the supplier themselves — or people connected to them — registers the mark. After that they gain leverage: they can, for example, block the export of your own goods by pointing to their trademark and a customs recordation.

If you sell, or plan to sell, in China — directly or through marketplaces. Without local registration you risk discovering that you're trading under someone else's mark (i.e., no longer your own) and receiving an infringement claim over your own brand.

If you're simply visible. An active brand with a recognizable name and traffic is a target in itself, even if China isn't on your radar yet.

Why a US Mark Doesn't Help Here

Another common expectation is that US registration somehow "covers" the brand in China. It does not. Trademark rights are territorial: registration in the US applies in the US. Beyond the country it grants no automatic protection — not in China, not anywhere else. For a brand to be protected in a specific jurisdiction, it needs separate registration there — either directly or through international mechanisms, which we cover in a separate breakdown of the Madrid System.

From this follows the main practical takeaway: in a first-to-file country you must arrange protection in advance — before your brand becomes known to suppliers, competitors, and professional squatters. Later it's no longer about registration, but about buyout negotiations or a long and costly dispute with an unpredictable outcome.

In a first-to-file country, "we'll register later" too often turns into "we'll buy it back later." The cost gap between a timely filing and negotiating with a squatter is orders of magnitude, not percentages. — Anton Chekhov, founder and CEO of Edeal

What We Do About It

At Edeal we don't send clients off to deal with a foreign office alone, and we don't turn it into a "do-it-yourself" quest. The logic is the same whether it's the US or another country.

We start with a consultation with an attorney (about 30 minutes) — we map out where you already operate, where you manufacture, where you plan to grow, and which markets to secure first. Then we run a deep search across USPTO and international databases: we check whether your name is free, whether applications have already been filed for it, including bad-faith ones. After that we agree on a strategy and give recommendations — which classes and jurisdictions to file in, and in what order, to close the biggest risks ahead of the rest. And only then do we file applications and manage the process to the finish, staying in touch at every stage.

One thing that many find non-obvious: we register trademarks worldwide and can protect a brand in virtually any country. China is a frequent and telling case, but far from the only one where "we'll register later" turns into an expensive mistake.