Procuratorates have intensified the comprehensive judicial protection of intellectual property rights via specialized case handling, with about 13,000 people being prosecuted for IP infringements last year, according to the Supreme People’s Procuratorate (SPP). They also intensified the supervision of civil administration litigation, which refers to a citizen or organization initiating a lawsuit against administration departments for violations. Procuratorates handled 937 cases of IP civil administration litigation last year, up 72.2% year-on-year. Liu Taizong, Director of the SPP’s IPR Procuratorial Office, said that IPR cases often involve cutting-edge and professional problems, especially technical cases involving patents and trade secrets, requiring a team of prosecutors with professional knowledge and skills. To meet those needs, the SPP set up the IPR Procuratorial Office in November 2020 to coordinate resources from the criminal, civil, administrative and public interest litigation departments to carry out IP protection.
By the end of last year, 29 provincial-level procuratorates had set up IPR procuratorial departments with professional personnel. In 2022, the SPP also issued a guideline to clarify the principles, tasks, specific measures and case-handling procedures for IPR procuratorial work. “While strengthening the legal protection of IPR, procuratorial organs actively integrate the national IPR protection system, and their work is not limited to handling cases, but to put forward timely suggestions on social governance problems found to make up for the loopholes in governance,” he said. In the process of case handling, the procuratorates have focused on the key national innovation sectors, highlighting protection in emerging technologies and in areas such as information technology, artificial intelligence and biomedicine, he said. About 220 people have been prosecuted for infringing on trade secrets in the past two years.
The SPP is encouraging procuratorial organs to set up IPR departments or specialized case-handling organizations in light of local conditions to integrate the resources from different procuratorial departments. Meanwhile, it will promote the system of assisting case handling by technical investigators and expert approval to ensure the quality of case handling. Procuratorial organs will also pay close attention to frontier IP issues in the fields of the metaverse, non-fungible tokens, databases and short videos, and strengthen in-depth research on different types of IPR, protection methods and legal risks, he said, as reported by the China Daily.
