China's Grass-roots Courts to Handle Patent Dispute Cases

View: 1994     Date: 2013-04-12 03:27

(Source: China daily)

Recently, more and more grass-roots courts will be allowed to hear patent lawsuits in response to an increasing number of intellectual property disputes in China. A judicial interpretation released recently states that the Supreme People's Court may, depending on actual circumstances, designate grass-roots people’s courts to exercise jurisdiction over first-instance trials of patent dispute cases.

Restricting the jurisdiction of patent lawsuits to the intermediate and higher people’s courts had played a vital role in standardizing judicial rulings and nurturing specialized judges in the early days of civil patent rulings, when the number of such cases was small, and judicial expertise and experience hearing these cases was limited, according to a statement released by the Supreme People’s Court on its website. However, with the soaring number of patent disputes in recent years, there have been growing calls to expand the number of grass-roots courts holding jurisdiction over intellectual property cases.

Song Yushui, vice president of Beijing's Haidian District Court, said it is time to allow more judges from grass-roots courts to get involved in hearing patent cases and shoulder part of the workload. The Haidian court was one of the three pilot grass-roots courts approved by the Supreme People's Court to hear patent disputes in 2009. Song said, the new stipulation will make patent ruling more efficient and reduce the cost for the public to file such cases, so it will aid in the protection of IP rights in the long run.

In 2012, courts at all levels in the country heard and closed nearly 237,800 civil litigation cases regarding intellectual property rights, up over 37 percent year-on-year.