Shanghai courts handle 6% more cases in 2019

Shanghai courts accepted 23,580 civil, administrative and criminal cases and handled 23,510 last year, marking increases of some 4 and 6 percent respectively from 2018, the Shanghai High People's Court announced on Thursday.

First-instance disputes on franchise contracts and patents saw significant rises of 140 and 90 percent respectively, while unfair competition disputes declined by 67 percent.

The increase of first-instance copyright and trademark right disputes slowed down, with growth of 5 and 20 percent.

In one case from 2015 detailed in a white paper on intellectual property issued by the court, a man named Xu Zhenwei asked his accomplice, Huang Jiecheng, to work on the research and development of the formula and materials to produce fake cosmetic products of Kiehl's and LaboLabo.

Kiehl's and LaboLabo are two trademarks that French cosmetics company L'Oréal and Japan-based DR.CL:LABO had already registered in China on cosmetics and other commodities.

With the help of other accomplices, Xu printed fake Kiehl's labels and got some bottles, caps, boxes and other packing materials. He employed four workers to fill in the bottles with the self-made cosmetics, labeling and packing them with the forged labels. The fake Kiehl's and LaboLabo products were then sold to retailers.

The amount of money involved in the production and sales of products with fake registered trademarks committed by Xu, Huang and four other counterfeit gang members reached more than 4.63 million yuan (US$653,576).

The chief culprits Xu and Huang were sentenced to respectively four and a half years and three years in jail for counterfeiting registered trademarks, with fines of 2.2 million yuan and 330,000 yuan.

A retailer, Wang Bin, who bought fake cosmetics from the gang and resold them was given four-year imprisonment for selling counterfeit goods and fined 2.1 million yuan.

Another seven gang members got jail terms ranging from one year and four months to one year and 10 months, with fines of 50,000 to 80,000 yuan.

All the fake products, labels and tools used for making the knockoffs were confiscated, with the illegal gains also retrieved.