On 25 Apr. 2024, China’s Supreme People’s Procuratorate (SPP) released the “White Paper of Intellectual Property Crime Prosecution (2021-2023)” (知识产权检察工作白皮书(2021—2023年)).
This is the first time that the SPP has published a white paper related to IP crimes, which provides an overview of IP cases involving criminal, civil, administrative, and public interest prosecution handled by Chinese procuratorates over the past three years.
From 2021 to 2023, the number of IP crimes accepted, reviewed, and prosecuted by procuratorates nationwide rose from 22,000 to 30,700. In addition, the number of IP cases involving civil or administrative prosecution supervision has been increased significantly year by year, with a 3.1-fold year-on-year increase in 2021, a 72.2% year-on-year increase in 2022, and another 1.7-fold year-on-year increase to 2,508 cases in 2023.
The white paper selects several typical cases for illustration. The SPP has guided procuratorates at all levels to handle a number of criminal cases involving infringement of enterprises’ key technologies in emerging fields such as chip manufacturing, power batteries, artificial intelligence, and biomedicine. Take, for example, the case of Zhang and others infringing on commercial secrets. In this case, the Shanghai Procuratorate determined in accordance with the law that the defendant company had colluded with employees of the victim company to illegally obtain the chip technology for the design and production of the same type of chips, and that the reasonable licensing royalties on the technology involved amounted to hundreds of millions of CNY.
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