Is it worth filing for a patent in China? What kind of damage awards can you get? Pharma companies care more about injunction than damage awards, since it’s quite unlikely that any damage award can compensate for the large amounts of money that may be lost for patent infringement. Chinese courts often issue injunctions in pharma patent litigations (both by the court and administrative enforcement bureaus), though damage awards are possible too. Although not all court cases are publicly available, there have been some recent published cases with pretty high damage awards, ranging from $750K USD to $25M USD. Keep in mind these are cases litigated under the old patent…
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- China, Court Cases, Courts, EIP Coffee Break, EIP Patent 101 Corner, prosecution, Supreme People's Court
Do Invention and UM Patents Filed on the Same Day Rise and Fall Together?
Snippets of Court Cases, Provisions, and Key Observations about China’s IP Landscape Seminal Cases by the SPC Recently, the Intellectual Property Division of the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) issued a list of seminal (精品) cases. Although China is not a case law country, such seminal cases issued by the SPC have high guiding impact for similar cases in the future, so they are still worthy of attention. One of the seminal cases ((2020) 最高法知民终699号) is very interesting. It involves a set of “same day applications”, i.e. an invention patent and utility model (UM) patent directed towards the same invention filed on the same day. The key issue is: if the…
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2020 China Top 10 IP Cases: Winners’ Sun is truly a Winner: A Simple Selfie-Stick Utility Model Patent Crushes Infringers in China
Each year The Intellectual Property Tribunal of the Supreme People’s Court releases a list of top 10 technical intellectual property rights court case decisions. The 2020 list came out a few months ago, and we have been highlighting some of these cases. Today, we will cover a utility model patent infringement case. As one of the three types of patents one can obtain in China (the other two being invention patents and design patents), utility models are popular due to their reduced costs and relative ease of prosecution (no substantive examination). Some might argue that a utility model patent has limited value, having restricted subject matter eligibility, a shorter term,…
