On April 21, 2022 China’s Supreme People’s Court (SPC) released the Top 10 IP Cases in Chinese Courts in 2021 (2021年中国法院10大知识产权案件). The cases cover trademark infringement, unfair competition, trade secret misappropriation, antitrust, new plant variety infringement, invention patent infringement, and copyright infringement. Of particular note was Wyeth’s win for trademark infringement that resulted in a significant punitive damages award and a vanillin trade secret misappropriation case that led to one of the highest intellectual property verdicts in China. China also …
Category: Unfair Competition
China’s Supreme People’s Court Issues Judicial Interpretation of Anti-Unfair Competition Law
On March 16, 2022, China’s Supreme People’s Court issued the Judicial Interpretation (JI) of Anti-Unfair Competition Law (UCL) (最高人民法院关于适用〈中华人民共和国反不正当竞争法〉若干问题的解释), which will go into effect March 20, 2022. The Anti-Unfair Competition Law has been used effectively by foreigners in trademark and trade dress cases when the foreigners’ trademarks have not been registered (or in addition to a trademark infringement claim for a registered trademark). Per a press conference held by the Third Civil Division of the Supreme People’s Court, one of …
China’s State Administration for Market Regulation Releases Typical Unfair Competition Case List
On July 16, 2021, the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) published a Notice entitled “Innovating the way of popularizing the law, strengthening the case analysis activities of anti-unfair competition through case interpretation, and achieving good results” (创新普法方式 强化以案释法反不正当竞争案例解析活动取得良好效果). The Notice includes a list of ten typical anti-unfair competition administrative cases with comments, of which 4 are intellectual property related (trade secret and trademark). SAMR summaries and comments follow.
Beijing Intellectual Property Court Affirms Jaguar Land Rover’s Win Against Landwind for Copying Evoque
According to a report in China’s IPR Daily, on May 27, 2021, the Beijing Intellectual Property Court affirmed Jaguar Land Rover’s (JLR) win against Landwind (陆风) for unfair competition relating to the Landwind X7, a vehicle that looks remarkably similar to the JLR Evoque. Landwind must issue an apology, pay compensation and cease infringing. Earlier, JLR successfully invalidated Landwind’s design patent for the X7. However, JLR failed in its claim for copyright infringement on appeal.