China IP SME Helpdesk Newsletter

In November 2023, the China’s Supreme People's Court amended the Jurisdiction Rules of the IP Tribunal, limiting the scope of the cases handled by the special IP Tribunals so that the IP Tribunals will focus on ‘significant and complicated’ cases. Read the China IP SME Helpdesk external expert Dr Leslie Xu’s analysis to learn what this means in practice for the right holders. The article was first published on the website of Chang Tsi & Partners.

As part of the amended ‘Rules for the Implementation of the Patent Law of the People’s Republic of China’, the CNIPA will “improve its efficiency and quality of patent application reviews” by streamlining the processes. The CNIPA will also make more efforts in reviewing patent applications involving “new fields and emerging businesses, including those on big data, artificial intelligence and gene technology”.

The amended ‘Rules for the Implementation of the Patent Law of the People's Republic of China’ will enter into force on January 20, 2024. The amendments mainly concern “the patent application system patent examination system patent protection and improving the patent dispute handling and mediation system; […] government services, and special provisions for international application for industrial design to comply with the Hague Agreement on the International Registration of Industrial Design”.

In early December, the Supreme People's Court required Chinese courts to “strengthen the intellectual property protection of litigants, regardless of their origin [including foreign litigants], by accurately applying international rules and conventions”. This is part of China’s further ‘opening-up’ policy. While it’s early to say how the practice evolves, this is good news for the European SMEs facing IP issues in China.

Recently, the Beijing Internet Court issued a very first judgment in a copyright case that involved the use of pictures generated by the AI. In this case, the defendant had used pictures generated by the AI without the permission of the plaintiff who had created those pictures with the help of the AI. The court ruled in favor of the plaintiff stating that “the AI-generated pictures were original and belonged to the owner of the pictures who generated them with AI technology”. Based on the judgement, European SMEs can also expect at least some protection to their AI generated images in China.