Last year, the Federal Circuit Bar Association along with USPTO and Chief Judge Rader of the Federal Circuit, amongst others, held extensive discussions with Chinese IP judges on the importance of making non-confidential versions of its opinions available, including introducing judicial and administrative (USPTO, USITC) procedures that facilitate the publication of non-confidential versions of final decisions.  In those discussions, we were mostly told that there was no-mechanism for publishing non-confidential versions of court decisions.  I had also previously blogged about this, requesting that a non-confidential version of the case is released in order to better inform the public.

This is an important step by the Guangdong High Court that could ultimately facilitate greater transparency in a wide range of IP (and hopefully non-IP) cases, including trade secret cases, patent cases, licensing and contractual disputes, where confidential information may have been disclosed by the parties as a critical part of the case and publication would otherwise have not been available.

The Shenzhen Intermediate Court, which was the court of first instance, has not yet made a redacted version of its decision publicly available.   However, as I noted in my earlier blog, several of its judicial officials have written on the case (See Ye Ruosi, Zhu Jianjun and Chen Wenquan, Determining Whether Standards-SEP Holder Abuse Its Dominant Position, Electronics Intellectual Property, Mar. 2013).

 (posted by Amanda Ma, further edited by Mark Cohen on April 27, 2014)