On April 25th, Quality Brands Protection Committee of China Association of Enterprises with Foreign Investment (QBPC) Patent and Innovation Committee (PIC) held an online seminar on the Practice and Development of Standard Essential Patent in China. Lawyer Xu Jing, partner of Beijing King and Wood Mallesons, was invited to make a presentation. The seminar was chaired by PIC vice chair Simon Xia. PIC chair Deng Jun, PIC vice chairs Frank Liu, Paul Lu, Wang Dazhi and more than 50 QBPC members were present.
According to incomplete statistics, from 2012 to 2022, China's courts at all levels accepted more than 170 first-instance cases of standard essential patents, mainly in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Nanjing, Wuhan and other cities. The patent infringement disputes accounted for more than 80% of all cases.
From the perspective of case types, the SEP cases included patent infringement cases, anti-monopoly cases, SEP license fee disputes, etc. As the latest development, the Intellectual Property Court of the Supreme People's Court clarified in the ruling on jurisdictional objection of "Oppo v. Sharp case" that Chinese courts have the right to rule on the conditions of global licensing based on unilateral request, making the SEP license fee dispute an extremely important case type. However, there had been no public judgment on the merits so far involving the global licensing conditions of SEP.
An important issue related to SEP is injunction. China's injunction is a system designed under the framework of China's existing "act preservation" (i.e. temporary injunction). Its legal concept is that the court makes a temporary injunction against the other party according to the application of one party, so as to order the other party to withdraw the litigation in other courts, the injunction claims or must not apply for the enforcement of the injunction already made by other courts. The first "injunction" in China was a maritime injunction made by Wuhan Maritime Court in 2017. In the field of SEP, the Supreme People's Court, Wuhan Intermediate People's Court and Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court have successively issued relevant injunctions.
During the Q&A session, Xu Jing answered the questions raised by the participants.
SEP has become an increasingly important topic in the patent field, attracting the attention of QBPC members, academicians, judges, lawyers and other groups. In the future, PIC will arrange more relevant activities according to the feedback of members.