On April 24, 2025, China’s Supreme People’s Court (SPC) and Supreme People’s Procuratorate (SPP) jointly issued the Interpretation on Several Issues Concerning the Application of Law in Handling Criminal Cases of Intellectual Property Infringement (关于办理侵犯知识产权刑事案件适用法律若干问题的解释). The Interpretation clarifies trademark crimes, patent counterfeiting, copyright crimes, trade secret misappropriation, and common issues arising in IP crimes (e.g., heavier or reduced sentences). The Interpretation is effective as of April 26, 2025.
Category: Copyright
China’s Supreme People’s Court Releases Summary of the Annual Report on the Application of Law in Intellectual Property Cases (2024) Listing 41 Case-Derived IP Laws
On April 21, 2025, China’s Supreme People’s Court released the Summary of the Annual Report on the Application of Law in Intellectual Property Cases (2024) (全国法院知识产权案件法律适用问题年度报告（2024）摘要) listing 41 laws derived from 2024 IP litigation cases (and 2 from antitrust). While China is not a common law country, China’s SPC regularly releases guiding or typical cases as well as these summaries to promote uniformity to help ensure similar cases are treated consistently across different courts.
Chinese Court Again Rules AI-Generated Images Are Eligible for Copyright Protection
On March 7, 2025, the Changshu People’s Court announced that it had ruled that images generated with Artificial Intelligence (AI) are eligible for copyright protection. This is believed to be the second case regarding AI-generated images with the Beijing Internet Court ruled similarly in late 2023. In the instant case, Lin XX generated an image of a half heart in a city waterfront using Midjourney and further used Photoshop to edit the image. An unnamed Changsha real estate company then used …
Chinese Copyright Registrations Up 19% in 2024
Per a release (国版发函〔2025〕4号) from the National Copyright Administration of China dated February 28, 2025, the total number of copyright registrations in China for 2024 reached 10,630,610, a year-on-year increase of 19.13%. Of these, 2,827,213 registrations were for computer software copyright registrations in 2024, an increase of 13.31% year-on-year. Other copyright registrations totaled 7,802,965 in 2024, an increase of 21.39% year-on-year.