On June 1, the SPC released a new draft judicial interpretation on patent validity litigation for public comment (最高人民法院关于审理专利授权确权行政案件若干问题的规定（一）[公开征求意见稿]).  Comments are due within a month.  The Chinese draft is found here.  Here is a translation provided by the Anjie law firm.

The draft should be of interest to foreign companies, who frequently challenge final decisions of the Patent Review Board at the Beijing IP Court. According to data published by the Beijing IP court, in 2013, nearly 35% of the administrative patent cases involved foreigners.   According to the SPC’s report on IP litigation for last year (to be further discussed in a future blog) there were 872 such adminsitrative patent cases in 2017，a decline fo 22.35% from the prior year.

One provision directly addresses post-filing supplementation of data in chemical patents.  The draft seems to suggest that post filing experimental data will be accepted when there is an different technical effect for review that is  “directly and unambiguously” disclosed in the application.  On first read, this seems to be a narrower view than the revised patent examination guidelines which look to whether the data can be obtained from the original application (补交实验数据所证明的技术效果应当是所属技术领域的技术人员能够从专利申请公开的内容中得到的).   Western pharmaceutial companies reportedly still are having difficulties having post-filing data accepted by SIPO and the courts, despite several years of engagement on this issue.  Here is the relevant paragraph fromt the proposed JI:

 If Please send me any comments on this provision or – even better – if any organizations or companies want to share your formal comments on the JI, I would be happy to post them here.  (rev. 6/21/2018 to include link to translation)