Patent Law

The following is excerpted from a June 5, 2008 Evaluserve press release that appeared at SANEPR:

Although China is still struggling with the image of being a safe haven for intellectual property counterfeiters and thieves, during the last two decades it has developed its patent system significantly, and incorporated an online and searchable patent database, a robust appeal mechanism, and a hierarchy of courts for handling intellectual property disputes. As a result, more than four million patent applications were filed from early 1985 to December 2007. The first million applications were filed over 15 years, but the last million took only 18 months. These measures also resulted in a substantial increase in lawsuits related to patent infringement. For example, in 2005, 2,947 patent-related cases were filed in Chinese courts, representing an increase of 15.6 percent from 2004. In contrast, the number of patent-related lawsuits in the United States decreased from 2,973 in 2004 to 2,812 in 2006. The difference in the number of legal cases related to all forms of intellectual property (e.g., patents, trademarks, copyright, and trade secrets) is even more significant: in 2005, 13,424 cases were filed in China, whereas only 10,905 were filed in the United States.

Read the full release here.