The introduction to the specific IP adjudication of China

Good morning ladies and gentlemen. It’s my honor to stand here and share with you a brief introduce of the Beijing Intellectual Property Court. First, I’d like to thank the organizer, thank you for providing this platform for Chinese IP Court, and thank you all for attending this meeting and listening to my speech. Now let me start off.

In China, there are 3 SIPJs, in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. The Beijing Intellectual Property Court was established in November 6, 2014 for trying IP-related cases on both first instance and second instance level.First instance cases including technologies-involved civil and administrative cases in respect of patents, new plant varieties, layout-designs of integrated circuits, know-how, computer software and so on; administrative cases brought against the administrative acts conducted by departments of the State Council involving patent and trademark; civil cases of determination of well-known trademark.The second instance cases of appeal relating to copyright and trademark, which were previously handled by basic courts. At present, the Beijing IP Court tries IP-related civil and administrative cases. In the future, the court will have jurisdiction over IP-related criminal cases. Next I will introduce the basic circumstances of Beijing IP Court in 3 parts.

As for the first part, structure of the Beijing IP Court.The Beijing IP Court has 3 sections. The first section is Trial Divisions, First Adjudication Division, Second Adjudication Division, and Trial Supervision Tribunal. The second section is Judicial Auxiliary Institutions, which mainly consists of the judicial police. And the third section Technical Investigation Office, which constitutes the major characteristic of our court. The principal responsibility of the technical investigation officer is to assist judge about technologies-involved cases.At the beginning, we have 24 judges, and now we have 44 judges, with an average age of 40, and 91% of them have at least Master Degree. We have 23 judge assistants and they are mainly responsible for assisting daily work of judges, like preparations for trial, investigation during the trail and document drafting after the trail. We also have 50 court clerks. And I have engaged in IP trial for nearly 16 years and tried nearly 2000 cases.

Then the second part, Statistics of the Beijing IP Court.There are nearly 150,000 IP-related cases were received nationwide, and nearly 14,000 IP-related cases were received in Beijing.Late year, we had accepted 9191 cases, each judge handled 354 cases on average. There are 7545 first instance cases, including 189 copyright disputes, 5531 trademark disputes, 1696 patent disputes and 189 other disputes; and we had accepted 1629 second instance cases, including 1278 copyright disputes, 123 trademark disputes, 16 patent disputes and 212 other disputes.

Cases accepted by the Beijing IP Court have mainly four characteristics: the first of all technologies-involved cases are more than 25% of the total; second administrative cases are more than 90%; third cases of first instance are more than 84%; the last one cases are of great social influence and draw much attention.Last year, we had concluded 5432 cases, each judge concluded 209 cases on average. There are 3934 first instance cases, including 59 copyright disputes, 3245 trademark disputes, 597 patent disputes and 33 other disputes; and we concluded 1485 second instance cases, including 1196 copyright disputes, 98 trademark disputes, 14 patent disputes and 177 other disputes.

For myself, I concluded 244 cases in 2015.The highest amount of cases concluded by one judge is 279.

And the foreign-related cases are 1095. (You could look at the details in this paper.) No Russia. Sorry.Statistics show that 72.3% plaintiffs won first instance civil cases in 2015. There are altogether 63 first instance civil cases in which foreigner are plaintiffs. What is the winning percentage for foreign party? You may have a guess! It is 100%! I repeat, last year there are altogether 63 first instance civil cases in which foreigner are plaintiffs, and they are all win!

Protection of foreign-related IP cases have three principles: The principle of national treatment, the principle of minimum protection standard and the principle of public interest.

The third part, Characteristics of the Beijing IP Court.Last year, more than 5000 people attended hearing open to public.Judgements of all concluded cases are available on websites like the China Judgements Online. 

There are modernized equipment to assist court sessions. In the Beijing IP Court, video and speech recognition system are introduced into court sessions. The speech recognition system is capable of recognizing speech automatically and saving it in next, thus alleviating the workload of court clerks.We have a Judicial Research Center, which is responsible for quoting precedents as the reasoning in the judgements.We also have an International Exchange Center, in last year, more than 500 foreign experts and scholar were invited to our court for academic exchange.

And the fourth part, Features of Chinese IP protection are: first, the external demand dominated has changed to internal demand dominated; second, the IP protection is judicial protection dominated, stimulates and protects the innovation which oriented by the market; third, the effects of the IP protect is favorable that the foreign invest is increasing, the independent innovation is in rapid development, the industry structure is upgrading. 

This is end of speech, thanks for your attention, thank you very much!