Since the establishment in November, Beijing Intellectual Property (IP) Court (hereinafter Beijing IP Court) has received more than 220 IP cases. Among all the cases, 219 were first instance cases, including 138 administrative cases and 81 civil cases involving patent infringements, computer software piracy, technical secret theft and well-known trademark infringement.
Following are the characteristics of these IP cases. First, administrative cases accounts for 63% of all the cases and there is particular tendency of increase of administrative cases relating to trademarks. Second, technical cases occupy a large proportion. There are 102 cases relating to invention patents, technical secrets and computer software piracy, covering wide range of areas including pharmaceuticals, machinery, electronics, automation technology etc. Third, many of the cases have significant influence and have drawn much attention from the public, such as the Wechat trademark dispute, "莫言"trademark dispute, "陌陌"trademark infringement case, invalidation case between Huawei Company and ZTE Cooperation. Fourth, there were a large number of foreign cases (including those relating to Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan) and cross provincial cases. 79 cases are related to foreign parties and 158 relating to cross provincial parties.
It is learned from Beijing IP court that future efforts will be focused in three areas. The first is to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of legal assistance using advance execution, evidence preservation, property preservation and act preservation etc.; and to establish a compensation mechanism to meet with the demands for IP protection. A mechanism is to be set up on order to calculate the amount of damages. The attorney fee of the prevailing party may be borne by the losing party. The second is to establish cases examination guidelines to ensure the application of law and uniformity of enforcement standards, such as information disclosure of typical or controversial cases to the public. The third is to improve the examination quality by using investigators or people's assessors with technological background, and to provide technological trainings to the judges etc..
