Historically, China promulgated its first patent law in the 1980s, the result of its reopening and affiliation to the WIPO, which led to the country’s joining important multilateral agreements, such as the Paris Union Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property (1984) and the TRIPS Agreement (2001). This patent law entered into force in 1985…

This short post reports on one of the Panel Sessions at this year’s AIPPI Congress which took place virtually for the second year in a row. The tenth panel session of the AIPPI Online World Congress 2021 addressed global FRAND determinations by national courts and out-of-jurisdiction judgments in the form of anti-suit and anti-anti-suit injunctions….

On 1 June 2021, the Amended Patent Law took effect and introduced patent term extension (“PTE“) and patent linkage (“PL“), which are closely related to the pharmaceutical industry. The legislative amendment reflects China’s determination to promote the research and development of innovative drugs in the pharmaceutical industry. The China National Intellectual Property Administration (“CNIPA“), the…

A recent dispute over standard essential patent (SEP) between Inter Digital, Inc. and its affiliates (collectively “IDC“) and Xiaomi Communication Technology Co., Ltd. and its affiliates (collectively “Xiaomi“) before the Wuhan Intermediate People’s Court (“WIPC China“) has drawn wide public attention.  The concerned technologies involve SEPs related to 3G and 4G standards. It is a…

The IP Tribunal of the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) recently issued a decision in Dunjun v. Tengda ((2019) SPC IP Civil No. 147), holding that the manufacturer’s making and selling of routers directly infringed a telecommunication method-of-use patent even though the manufacturer itself did not perform one single step of the patented method. This article…

On 5 December 2019, the IP Tribunal of the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) handed down two decisions in which – in a first for China, the SPC heard and decided on both the patent validity and infringement disputes in one consolidated proceeding.  Background The two actions arose out of a patent infringement dispute between the…

Declaratory-judgment actions of non-infringement are common in patent litigation because it allows the alleged infringer to proactively bring suit to resolve the situation and eliminate the cloud of uncertainty looming overhead. Under Chinese law, to bring a claim for declaratory judgment in a patent dispute, the claimant must establish that: (1) the patentee sends a…

After several rounds of revisions, the latest draft of the 4th amendment of the Patent Law was released by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (“NPC”) after its first reading in December 2018. This version is expected to be very close to the final amendment. As a response to the “Opinions on strengthening…

In our blog of last December, we reported that China has established a new IP Tribunal within the Supreme People’s Court (the “SPC”) as a national IP appellate court akin to the federal circuit in the United States. The new SPC IP Tribunal commenced operation from Jan 1, 2019 in Beijing. Interim Judgment On March…

The Supreme People’s Court of China recently issued a new judicial interpretation regarding preliminary injunctions (PI) for intellectual property (IP) disputes that took effect on January 1, 2019, officially titled “Provisions of The Supreme People’s Court on Several Issues Concerning the Application of Laws in Adjudication of Action Preservation Cases Involving IP Disputes” (Provisions). The…