Concurrently with the June 29, 2010 signing of a major trade agreement called the Cross-Strait Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA), Taiwan and China signed an additional agreement on intellectual property rights (IPR) protection. The new agreement highlights effective resolutions and new approaches to the pressing IP problems between the two nations and lays out goals to promote inspection cooperation, industrial cooperation and certification services, collaboration and protection of patent and trademark priority rights, and includes a joint mechanism to monitor cross-border criminal infringement. This new agreement reflects the universal value attached to safeguarding IPR in order to foster innovation and R&D investment in the corporate sector in both China and Taiwan. IPR owners in the United States and elsewhere doing business in Taiwan and China will also be beneficiaries of this further cooperation.