Crackdown on fake trademarks

Local prosecutors accepted more than 430 criminal cases related to intellectual property infringement last year with 781 people involved, an increase of 20 percent on 2017, according to a Shanghai People's Procuratorate white paper.

More than 80 cases involved foreign companies.

Almost 90 percent of cases were trademark-related, such as counterfeiting trademarks to sell products because of low cost and high profit, prosecutors said.

In one case, counterfeit goods were sold to almost 900 cities overseas for a total of 140 million yuan (US$21 million).

Crimes involving business secrets rose from one to six in 2017 with most of them in high-tech and emerging industries such as machine manufacturing and biological sciences.

Negligence in managing employees and in data protection brought risks with staff having easy access to confidential documents and some taking details of secret technologies with them when they left their companies. 

A copyright infringement case handled by the Fengxian District People’s Procuratorate involved Gundam, a franchise which made and sold toy robots created by Japanese video game publisher and toy manufacturer Bandai.

Li Haiyan bought toys to make copies of them at a factory in Shantou, Guangdong Province. Between January 2016 and September 2017, he produced 33,000 copies and sold them for almost 3.8 million yuan.

On September 28, 2017, police raided the factory and seized more than 3,000 fake toys.

Li was charged with infringing copyright and jailed for three and a half years. He was also fined 1.9 million yuan. The seized items were confiscated and the illicit gains recovered.

Li appealed, saying his toys were completely different to Bandai’s. However, experts found the toys to be almost identical. 

On Thursday, local customs also reported its efforts to crack down on counterfeits to protect participants at last year’s China International Import Expo. During the expo period, officers seized more than 300,000 products which infringed participants’ intellectual property rights.

In one case, a Guangzhou-based electronic technology company attempted to export some air curtain machines to Bangladesh. However, when officers checked, they found they all had the “National” trademark, which belongs to Japanese company Panasonic, and police were called.