Foreigners bring less patent infringement cases to Chinese courts than domestic plaintiffs because the deck is stacked against them. Chinese courts are biased in favor of protecting Chinese interests and even when foreigners get a judgement in their favor damages awarded are piffling. To make matters worse judgements are opaque leaving lawyers in the dark about how cases are likely to be resolved based on precedent.
Which part of the above is incorrect? The title of the paper highlighted this week is a bit of a giveaway; the answer is none. Renjun Bian from the University of California, Berkley, School of Law, in the paper highlighted this week has used a new database to analyze patent infringement judgements to see if there are patterns that plaintiffs can learn from; and there are.
Since January 1st 2014 it’s been mandatory for China’s courts to publish judgements on a new service China Judgements Online (so far the database has over 34-milion cases that can be analyzed). Taking 2014 as the sample 1,663 separate patent infringement judgements were examined and what came out was surprising.
80% of all cases found infringement, 90% of those cases led to permanent injunctions and 96% of those cases resulted in damages being awarded. In most cases the damages were, in fact, piffling being an average of U$12, 400. Non-Chinese winners though, on average, were awarded several times that sum with an average of U$42, 200 per case. Still not much compared to, say, the U.S.; but there’s no er-case to answer in terms of China courts being unfair to non-Chinese plaintiffs.
Chinese courts are,in fact, so improved that non-Chinese parties are starting to use them with the first case being in 2016 when Wilan, a Canadian company, filed against Sony in Nanjing. Who-da-thunkit?
You can access the paper in full via this link Many Things You Know about Patent Infringement Litigation in China Are Wrong.
Happy Sunday.