Recently, the Supreme People’s Court issued the special report of judicial data on intellectual property cases (hereinafter the report), showing that from 2015 to 2016, about 50.88% of these cases in China were closed via withdrawal.
In 2016, there was a rise in terms of the number of intellectual property infringement cases, an increase of 41.36% as compared with that of 2015. Among these cases, copyright cases, trademark cases and patent cases respectively accounted for 50.2%, 34.17% and 15.63%. Guangdong, Beijing and Zhejiang ranked top 3 regarding the number of concluded cases.
According to the report, foreign related intellectual property infringement cases involved 28 countries, and the U.S., France and Germany were among the top 3 in terms of case number. The plaintiffs and defendants of these cases were mainly corporations, which accounted for 87.32% of the plaintiffs and 74.76% of the defendants. About 23.35% of these cases had two or more defendants.
It is also pointed out that the average trial period for infringement cases was 105 days. Only 7.93% of the claims by the plaintiffs were fully supported by the court.
