CPA's Patent Invalidation Case Selected to Participate in
National IP Publicity Week Event & Two Winning Cases Included as Exemplary Cases 2024
From April 20-26 2025, the 2025 National Intellectual Property Publicity Week was celebrated, with events and activities surrounding the theme of "Intellectual Property and Artificial Intelligence" taking place in Beijing and across the country. A highlight of which was the open court hearings of selected important cases, and we are honoured to share that a case handled by our firm China Patent Agent (H.K.) Ltd. (CPA) was selected to be heard openly before the Supreme People's Court of China (SPC). In addition, two winning cases of CPA were announced during the IP publicity week as exemplary cases of 2024.
CPA patent invalidation case selected to participate in IP publicity week event
On 23 April 2025, the Intellectual Property Court of the SPC conducted open court hearing of an administrative dispute case involving patent validity brought by a domestic communication company against China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) and the patentee KPN. The hearing was attended by deputies to the National People's Congress, National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) members, and graduate students majoring in IP at universities. Our attorneys appeared in the appellate hearing on behalf of our client KPN.
The patent in question involves "network session association and management technology", which aims at solving the technical problem concerning joint control and management of multiple media sessions and their network resources in an IP multimedia subsystem (IMS). At the trial, our attorneys focused on supporting the inventiveness of the patent, highlighting the distinction between the patent and prior art, and using multimedia elements to visualise the complicated technical details involved so as to facilitate the court's understanding of the essence of the technology.
Dr. Yide Ma, dean of School of Intellectual Property of the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, fully affirmed the hearing as "exhibiting strong professional ability and precise grasp of the essence, in sorting out the technical details, interpretation of patent texts, and judgment regarding the application of legal standards".
CPA winning case named 2024 exemplary case of SPC IP Court
On 25 April 2025, the Supreme People's Court published the "Summary of Adjudication Principles of the Intellectual Property Court of the Supreme People's Court (2024)" ("the Summary"), containing 190 adjudication principles derived from 157 cases, which in turn were selected from the 4,213 cases concluded by the Intellectual Property Court in 2024. CPA's winning case representing a European client was one of the exemplary cases and the adjudication principle derived from our case was included in the Patent Ownership and Infringement Cases section of the Summary, reading as:
"Where the equipment sales and technical service contracts clearly restrict the disclosure of relevant technologies, if the equipment buyer who receives the technical service violates the agreement and arbitrarily applies for a patent for the technical solution formed on the basis of improvement over the technical solution provided by the equipment transferor, the equipment buyer cannot automatically enjoy the patent right benefited from such improvement."
CPA's winning patent infringement case selected as exemplary case of IP rights protection of Chinese and foreign enterprises
On 26 April 2025, the results of Exemplary Cases of Intellectual Property Rights Protection of Chinese and Foreign Enterprises 2024 were announced. Jointly launched by Xinhuanet, the web portal for news and information services of Xinhua News Agency, and Capital Intellectual Property Services Association (CIPSA), this selection shortlisted 41 cases through public solicitation from IP service institutions as well as Chinese and foreign enterprises. The exemplary cases cover a broad spectrum of IP rights protection, including agencies' assistance of clients' rights protection, IP commercialisation, dispute resolution, IP information use, and risk management, as well as enterprises' integration of IP and new technology, administrative means of protecting IP rights, protection of IP rights overseas, education and publicity to raise public awareness of IP rights protection, cooperation and alliances in IP exploitation and protection, and exemplification of IP's beneficial impacts on society and culture.
A winning patent infringement case of our firm was selected as an exemplary case of IP protection for clients. In this case, CPA helped client defending its rights against the infringement of unauthorised manufacturing and sales of its patented production lines. In addressing the common issue of low monetary compensation awarded in patent infringement cases, our case provides multi-faceted directions for factors that can be taken into consideration when determining the maximum statutory compensation, including the duration of the infringing behaviour, sales price and popularity of the infringing product, profit margin of the infringing product, technical contribution rate of the patent involved, and market share of the plaintiff.
