Exemplary Cases of IP Protection of Chinese and Foreign Enterprises 2024 Announced - CPA Patent Infringement Case Illustrates Successful Protection of Foreign Enterprise's Patent Right in China
The winners of the 2024 Exemplary Cases of Intellectual Property Rights Protection of Chinese and Foreign Enterprises, co-hosted by Xinhuanet, the web portal for news and information services of Xinhua News Agency, and the Capital Intellectual Property Service Industry Association, were recently revealed. The event aimed at leveraging the successful experiences of IP protection for the reference of the industry as well as enhancing the public awareness of the importance of IP protection and promoting the high-quality development of IP protection work.
The selected cases were solicited from IP service agencies as well as Chinese and foreign enterprises at home and overseas on the basis of their exemplary and guiding value. This year's model cases illustrated a broad spectrum of IP rights protection, including agencies' assistance of clients in 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 in IP exploitation and protection, and exemplification of IP's beneficial impacts on society and culture.
Among the selected cases was an invention patent infringement case handled by our firm China Patent Agent (H.K.) Ltd. (CPA). In this case, CPA successfully defended the foreign client's rights against the infringement of unauthorised manufacturing and sales of its patented production lines in China. According to Xinhuanet, this case provides useful guidance on tackling the issue of low monetary compensation generally awarded in patent infringement cases, by putting forward some factors that need to be taken into account in the determination of the maximum statutory compensation such as 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.
CPA as the entrusted patent agency played a crucial role in safeguarding client's IP rights throughout the process. It advised its client to file promptly an application for its patent at the technology research and development stage, and upon discovery of infringement, was quick to collect evidence, issue warning letters and bring the case to court, and in the court hearing CPA's litigation team presented a detailed comparison of the technical features between the infringing product and the patent owned by its client. In addressing the key issue of lacking directly relevant evidence for calculation of compensation, CPA proposed a formula for calculating the patent owner's losses by using the price difference between the patented product and the infringing product. This case was deemed as serving an important reference for similar future cases.
