Top 50 Representative Cases

SPC Upholds $2M RMB Award in China’s First Patent Case on a Biological Deposit

4 July 2022

On 28 Feb 2022, China’s Supreme People’s Court (SPC) issued its annual “Judgment Digests”, which includes a list of “48 typical cases” highlighting representative SPC decisions in 2021. The Judgment Digests help us understand more about the SPC’s judicial ideology, trial concepts, and adjudication methods in dealing with difficult and sophisticated legal issues as well […]

Narrow Claim Scope of a Chinese Utility Model Patent Fuels Design-Arounds by Failing to Curb Competing Products:

28 October 2020

Learning from a 2019 China’s Top 50 Representative IP Case The number of patent applications in China is now the highest in the world, with more than half the applications filed as utility model applications (UMs). For example, there were more than 2 million UMs filed in 2018 alone (for the difference between a utility […]

How Far Can an Employer Reach to Own Employee-made “Service Inventions”?

30 July 2020

2019 China’s Top 50 Representative IP Cases Shenzhen Weibang Technology Co. Ltd v. Li Jianyi & Shenzhen Yuancheng Intelligence Equipment Co. Ltd (2019最高法民申6342号) Each year in China there are hundreds of disputes over patent ownership. A significant part of them are related to “Service Inventions”, which are defined in Article 6 of the Chinese Patent […]

China Top 50 Case of 2019: How a Functional Feature is Construed Greatly Impacts Protection Scope - Shimano KK v. SENSAH

20 July 2020

Every year in the spring The Supreme People’s Court of PRC announces its “Top 10 Intellectual Property (IP) cases” and “50 typical IP cases in Chinese courts” of the year. Although not having precedential weight, these cases serve as a reference and guide people's courts at all levels regarding their intellectual property trials. It’s always […]

Stealing Trade Secrets: How the Chinese Court Criminally Sentences Employees that Steal Trade Secrets - 2019 China’s Top 50 Representative IP Cases

11 June 2020

The theft of trade secrets has always been a deep concern of foreign companies thinking of doing business in China, whether it be sharing protocols with a manufacturing partner, providing technology details to a potential investor, or sharing results from an R&D collaboration. How can businesses ensure that employees do not steal secrets and share […]