Recently, the Supreme People’s Court released the 2016 annual report on the intellectual property cases (hereinafter the report), which selected 27 typical cases relating to intellectual property concluded by Supreme People’s Court in 2016. Supreme People’s Court generalized 39 issues for application of law.
According to the statistics, in 2016, the Supreme People’s Court received 724 new intellectual property cases, of which there were 352 administrative cases and 372 civil cases. In terms of case type, there were 227 patent cases, 1 plant new variety case, 337 trademark cases, 64 copyright cases, 2 lay-out design of integrated circuits cases, 2 monopoly cases, 2 business secret cases, 23 unfair competition cases, 38 intellectual property contract cases and 18 other cases.
It is noted that the cases concerning patent and trademark accounted for the largest proportion of intellectual property cases in 2016. There was a significant increase in trademark licensing and ownership cases, and the judicial criteria and legal applications issues including adverse effect and prior rights remained disputable. Regarding patent administrative cases, the controversial issue is on the evaluation of novelty and inventiveness.
