China announces marked rise in IP cases in three years
China's highest court has recorded a surge of cases at its intellectual property tribunal, according to data published by China’s official news agency.
The intellectual property tribunal of China's Supreme People's Court (SPC) has accepted 9,458 cases on appeal since January 2019, Xinhua said.
This means the court has seen cases grow by an annual average of nearly 50% over the past three years.
The report was unveiled on Sunday, February 27, during an ongoing session of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress for review, and also revealed that 7,680 cases have been concluded by the intellectual property tribunal.
The SPC's tribunal was established in January 2019 to hear appeals on patents and other technology-related IP cases, as well as anti-monopoly cases, as part of China’s efforts to strengthen its protection of IP rights.
More than one-fifth of the cases handled by the tribunal concerned the new generation of information technology, high-end equipment manufacturing, biomedicine, and other emerging industries of strategic importance, according to the report.
Commenting on the findings, Zhou Qiang, president of the SPC, said:
“Chinese courts will further strengthen the protection of scientific and technological innovations and enhance the judicial protection of IP rights for core technologies in key fields and emerging industries,”
He added that concrete measures would be taken to maintain fair market competition, together with efforts to ensure the lawful and impartial handling of foreign-related IP cases.
These findings have been announced following the release of the China National Intellectual Property Administration’s fourteenth Five-Year Plan for patent and trademark examination in January 2022.
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