Xiao Yang: completed IPR-related cases greatly increase

In recent five years, the criminal, civil and administrative cases involving intellectual property rights handled by China's courts at all levels have witnessed tremendous increase, with the number reaching to 71,633 pieces.

This is demonstrated in the report submitted to the National People's Congress for review from China's Supreme People's Court.

Among them, civil cases had 62,218 pieces, 1.5 times more than those of the previous five years, and the fee of litigation objects arrived at 13.3 billion yuan, increasing by 70 percentage. In the meantime, administrative cases had 3,165 pieces, 4.87 times more than those of the previous five years.

The report also pointed out, since the enforcement of relevant interpretations on how to deal with IPR infringement cases made by the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate in 2004, the completed IPR-related cases have been annually on a rise, with an average growth rate of 22.69%, and amounted to 2,962 pieces, 1.33 folds more than those of the previous five years. Meanwhile, a total of 9,656 criminals who violated IPRs were sentenced in these five years.

While severely combating IPR infringement cases, Chinese government enlarged the extent of the fight against illegal business and producing and selling fake commodities which involved intellectual property rights, with 3,288 cases concluded in total, according to the report.

During the past few years, the Supreme People's Court successively promulgated many interpretations concerning several issues on application of law in hearing cases on unfair competition, the copyright dispute of computer software and the infringement of variety rights of new plants. [Chinese version is available on Chinanews.cn]