Recently, China's Supreme People's Court (SPC) introduced to the public the harsher penalties implemented against IP infringement crimes in 2013. These penalties include the following:
- Strengthening crackdown on IP infringement crimes in key areas and industries by more severe criminal liabilities. Examples are infringement of the said biggest trade secret case in China and a counterfeit trademark case against 28 defendants, where all the defendants were imposed both imprisonment and fines.
- Applying severe punitive financial measures in addition to criminal sanctions against IP infringement. In the said trade secret case, a fine was 37 million RMB was imposed on the defendants, highest ever in trade secret cases. In the counterfeit trademark case, the defendants were fined 27 million RMB.
- Depriving criminals of their capacity for repeated offenses through taking their illegal income, confiscating their criminal instruments and destructing the IP infringing products etc. .
Statistics show that in the past year of 2012, the SPC handled a total of 12794 IP infringement criminal cases involving 15518 defendants.
