On October 17, the 22nd Session of the Standing Committee of the 13th National People’s Congress voted through the Amendment to the P.R.C. Patent Law (the “New Law”). The New Law raises the upper limit of statutory damages to 5,000,000 RMB, and the lower limit to 30,000 RMB. The New Law will take effect on June 1, 2021.
The Amendment to the P.R.C. Patent Law this time mainly covers three important aspects:
(1) The first is to strengthen the protection for the patentees’ legitimate rights and interests, including increasing the damages for infringement upon patent rights, improving the provisions on burden of proof, perfecting the pre-trial preservation against infringing conduct, bettering the administrative protection for patent rights, adding the principle of good faith, introducing the patent term compensation mechanism and adding provision relating to early resolution procedure for disputes over pharmaceutical patents.
(2) The second is to promote the exploitation and application of patent rights, including improving the mechanism for service inventions, introducing the opening licensing system for patents, and strengthening the patent conversion services.
(3) The third is to perfect the patent granting system, including further improving the mechanisms concerning protection for design patents, adding circumstances in which the grace period for novelty can be applied, and improving the mechanism for patent evaluation report.
In order to further strengthen the protection for IP rights, the Amendment introduces the mechanism of punitive damages. Specifically, the People’s Court can determine the amount of damages between equivalent and five times the amount of the losses suffered by the patentee, the profits obtained by the infringer, or the licensing fee of the patent, and thus fully exert the deterrent power of law. The New Law also raises the amount of statutory damages by setting forth upper limit at 5,000,000 RMB and lower limit at 30,000 RMB.
To meet the needs of enterprises, the Amendment this time further improves the mechanisms relating to design patents:
(1) Protection will be granted for partial design patents.
(2) The protection term of design patents will be extended to 15 years.
(3) Domestic priority system is introduced for design patent applications: if an applicant files a patent applicant in China for the same subject again within six months after it/he files the application for the design patent for the first time in China, the applicant may enjoy priority.
In order to better confront emergency situations and extraordinary conditions such as the epidemic prevention and control, to promote timely application of the relevant invention and creation in areas such as disease treatment, to solve public health problems, and to respond to the inventors’ needs for broadening the exceptional circumstances of non-loss of novelty, the New Law adds a new provision to the said exceptional circumstances to preclude loss of novelty, i.e. “(if the invention) is published for the sake of public interests for the first time when the nation encounters emergency situations or extraordinary conditions”.
(Source: www.chinanews.com)
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