City enhances intellectual property protection
The annual report of the city's intellectual property development for 2020 is released on Monday on a briefing on the IP development in Shanghai to officials of foreign consulates in Shanghai as well as representatives of international organizations, foreign chambers of commerce and foreign businesses in Shanghai.
Shanghai courts accepted 71 percent more intellectual property cases last year than in 2019, according to the city's latest IP development report released on Monday.
The courts accepted more than 40,000 IP cases last year and concluded over 37,000 by the end of the year.
The city's procuratorates examined arrest applications from 866 cases of suspected IP crimes involving over 2,000 individuals and reviewed the indictability of 671 cases involving 1,436 people.
The police cracked 729 IP infringement cases and arrested 2,718 criminal suspects, up 16 percent and 136 percent from the previous year, and the cases involved about 4 billion yuan (US$62 million).
Shanghai has also enhanced its effort to step up efficiency in IP protection, including the introduction of the judicial affirmation of administrative mediation results last year to avoid uncertainty in the implementation of administrative decisions.
On international cooperation on IP protection, the World Intellectual Property Organization's Arbitration and Mediation Shanghai Service, the first business organization of foreign arbitration institutions in China, has accepted 27 cases referred by Shanghai courts and concluded 12 of them from March 2020 to June this year.
Lu Guoqiang, senior counselor at the WIPO Office in China, said the concluded cases spanned a vast area of IP issues.
"They involved trademark, copyright, patent, business secret and unfair competition issues, and were mostly filed by well-known companies from developed countries," he said. "Forty percent of the cases were successfully solved by means of mediation, which is a rather high percentage."
Rui Wenbiao, convenor of the Shanghai Intellectual Property Joint Committee and director general of the Shanghai Intellectual Property Administration, said the city will keep exploring innovations in IP policies, improving its IP protection system and strengthening its IP services and international cooperation.
"We hope to provide a better IP environment for all enterprises to help them thrive in Shanghai," he said.
The report was released during a briefing on IP in Shanghai for officials of foreign consulates in Shanghai as well as representatives of international organizations, foreign chambers of commerce and foreign businesses.
Olivier Zehnder, Consul-General of Switzerland in Shanghai, asked if Shanghai was the spearhead in the Yangtze River Delta regional integration in the IP area, as most Swiss companies in China work in this region.
Rui said Shanghai had initiated the signing of an agreement on the integration of IP protection with Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui provinces in 2018 which aims at a cross-regional network of combating IP infringement.
"Under the mechanism, the four parties have achieved solid progress in terms of the transfer of clues of IP infringement, mutual recognition of evidence and joint fight against IP infringement activities," he said.
The English portal of the Shanghai Intellectual Property Administration, www.ensipa.cn, was also launched at the briefing.
