China has been implementing a plethora of new laws and measures that are particularly favorable to drug companies, such as patent term extension and patent linkage. Details of the new implementation measures for patent linkage (technically “early dispute resolution mechanisms for drug patents”) came into effect on July 4, 2021. At around the same time, China’s public registration system for innovator companies to list patent associated with marketed drugs (China’s version of the US FDA’s “Orange Book”) began accepting registrations. It has been close to one year since these mechanisms were put in place. The first legal decisions from these patent challenges are now coming out, and the first appeal…
-
- Biotech, China, Court Cases, Courts, Patent Law, prosecution, Supreme People's Court, Top 50 Representative Cases
SPC Upholds $2M RMB Award in China’s First Patent Case on a Biological Deposit
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 as new types of IP cases in high tech fields. This case was one of the 48 “typical” cases and deals with how to determine infringement for claims covering biological deposits [1]. Case Background summary FengKe (上海丰科生物科技股份有限公司) is a Shanghai company owning a patent (201310030601.2) claiming a particular white mushroom fungal strain. The patent only…
- 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…
