Court reduces time spent on rights cases

The average number of days spent on IPR cases in Shanghai was 97 this year compared to 113 in 2017, the city’s intellectual property court said in a work report presented to the city’s legislature on Tuesday.

The court partly attributed the results to its recruitment of “technical investigators.”

The investigators had testified in trials 175 times, produced 293 opinions, taken part in evidence preservation and on-site investigations 226 times, and offered technical consultation to judges 523 times, according to the court.

The court also enables mediation and trials online. 

The court, established in December 2014, handled 9,540 intellectual property cases from January 2018 to November this year, of which 38 percent were related to patents, 33 percent to copyrights and 20 percent to trademarks. In 40 percent of cases closed, plaintiffs accepted mediation or dropped cases, according to the court.

The court said it also took measures to reduce plaintiffs’ costs and to increase compensation to parties whose rights were infringed.

Meanwhile, to support the economic development of the Pudong New Area, the city’s intellectual property administration recently authorized its Pudong administration to handle rulings and mediation of administrative cases in patent infringement.

So far, the Pudong administration has handled seven such cases which involved medicines, clothing and musical instruments, according to a report on Pudong policies presented to the legislature by the city’s development and reform commission.