Category Archives: empirical research

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A Data Download on Semiconductor Patent Litigation in China

Because of its strategic importance to both the United States and China, the IC sector is a useful example of how Chinese policies and plans may – or may not – be influencing the Chinese government in the protection of foreign-owned IP.

A useful starting point for evaluating the challenges in IC IP protection in China is the data collected from China’s court cases.  IP House has conducted a heretofore unpublished and useful study of all semiconductor-related patent disputes in its database, attached here (in Chinese).  The data shows that there have been 166 first instance civil patent infringements IP judgments with the word “chip” (芯片), and 86 second instance cases.    There have also been 142 first instance administrative decisions, typically involving validity matters, and ninety second instance decisions. 52.91% of the first instance cases involved invention patents, 10.31% involved utility model patents and 36.77% involved design patents.

Regarding civil cases, 39 were heard in Zhejiang, 35 in Guangdong, 27 in Beijing, 21 in Jiangsu and 11 in Shanghai.  Every other jurisdiction had fewer than five cases, and no cases were reported for Fujian Province.

The data suggest a comparatively low “success” rate for plaintiffs in semiconductor patent disputes.   Amongst the 183 reported judgments, only 51 cases were fully or partially successful — a 38.34% success rate.  This compared to an overall success rate of about 80% for litigants in patent cases in 2014 in China, as reported by Bian Renjun at Berkeley. Cases were not reversed to a significant degree on appeal; 60 out of 70 cases supported the original decision of the first instance court.  Amongst the “top 10 “ courts in terms of litigation volume, the success rate for semiconductor patent plaintiffs varied dramatically.   Guangdong had the highest success rate (60%), followed by Beijing (43.75%), Zhejiang (23.08%) and Jiangsu (19.05%).  76 of 77 successful litigants obtained an injunction to stop infringement; one litigant did not request an injunction.

Regarding administrative reviews, 117 out of 140 cases involved affirming the original administrative decision, an “affirmance rate” of 83.57 percent.  Eighty one out of ninety cases were affirmed on appeal.

The United States was the principal foreign civil litigant, with seven cases, followed by the British Virgin Islands and the Netherlands, each with two cases.  The United States was the principal first instance administrative plaintiff challenging SIPO’s decisions, with 30 cases, followed by Japan (5), Netherlands (3) and several countries with only one civil case (France, Germany, Cayman Islands, Korea,   Singapore and Israel).

I draw the following tentative conclusions from this data:

  1. Success rates for semiconductor cases vary dramatically by jurisdiction in China. My guess is that the Guangdong courts, which have the highest success rates, have greater expertise in both semiconductor patent litigation and patent litigation overall, which may make them more “expert” on these matters. Due to variations in success rates amongst jurisdictions, the semiconductor sector is a useful example of why China needs a national appellate IP court.
  2. No matter what major court one looks to, success rates for these cases are lower than the average for other types of patent litigation. This may suggest either a lack of familiarity with the technology or an unduly skeptical view of the courts regarding semiconductor patent assertions at this time. Considering that the vast majority of the cases do not involve foreigners, the low success rate primarily affects Chinese litigants.
  3. Foreigners, and especially Americans, use the courts primarily to litigate patent validity matters. There were 4.5 times more administrative semiconductor patent cases brought by Americans compared to infringement cases. Overall foreigners brought four times more validity cases compared to infringement cases in this area.  This means that the Beijing IP Court, which hears all validity disputes, plays a key role for foreigners on semiconductor patent matters.  Semiconductor patent cases also follow the general pattern where foreigners are disproportionately willing to challenge SIPO in court, but are less willing to bring infringement cases to final adjudication.
  4. Utility model and design patents are frequently asserted in patent disputes in China and may have value to foreign companies needing to protect their IP in this important market.
  5. The Fujian courts do not appear in this IP House report. However, Fujian has already heard one high profile case (AMEC v Veeco), which was settled and does not appear to be publicly available at this time. The second high profile case, involves Micron Technologies, and is currently on-going.

I hope to blog further about the AMEC cases in the United States and China in a subsequent posting.

 

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Asia/China at IP Scholars Conference at Berkeley: Call for Papers

The Intellectual Property Scholars Conference brings together intellectual property scholars to present their works-in-progress in order to benefit from the critique of colleagues. This year, the IPSC will be held in Berkeley August 9-10, and will include a special track dedicated to Asia IP law, including – I hope a focus on empirical research and China.   I will be blogging shortly on some of the interesting research I am seeing, and I hope that scholars from different disciplines will come to discuss their work.
Regular registration for IPSC will open later this year, but if you would like to present a paper, please submit an abstract using this form: https://goo.gl/forms/XHS y4eniAX6tuud63.
Deadline for submission of abstracts: May 25, 2018.
 
Deadline for submission of full papers or presentation slides: August 1, 201
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Update on Research on Technology Protectionism and the Chinese Patent System

Prof. Gaétan de Rassenfosse and Dr. Emilio Raiteri (both at EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland) have recently offered interesting statistical evidence for preferential treatment of domestic applicants and a potential issue with national treatment in patent applications in China. Their work shows that inventions by foreign firms were less likely to be granted patent protection, after adjusting for a range of other factors. However, their study of more than half a million patent applications reveals that only applications in “strategic” technology areas faced negative discrimination. More precisely, the probability that strategic patent applications by foreign firms will be granted is 5 to 15 percentage points lower than expected in the absence of discrimination.

Strategic technologies were identified using the ‘‘National Medium and Long-Term Program for Science and Technology Development 2006–2020’’ (citation to plan or to my blog) (“MLP”). The MLP, issued by the State Council, seeks to make China an innovation-driven nation by fostering indigenous innovation in selected technologies, including telecommunications, biotechnology and energy. Regarding telecommunications, the authors (with the co-authorship of Rudi Bekker of the Netherlands) find in another article that discrimination against foreigners was particularly strong among standard essential patents, an issue that was recently discussed by Professor de Rassenfosse in a recent webinar.

For background, one useful comparison of the MLP with other macro innovation/industrial policies has been prepared by Prof. Scott Kennedy.

There has been many complaints related to unfair treatment of foreign rights holders in the judicial system, and there has been some recent scholarship and support in analyses of newly launched databases, that suggests that China made significant progress in the area. Some of the sociological studies suggest that larger companies in China (as elsewhere), however, generally fare better in court.

The current paper focuses on consideration of disparate treatment and its causes in the patent system. However, the reason(s) for the effect are unclear and the authors are cautious not to infer that discrimination is intentional. They have ruled out a large number of possible explanations (such as differences in patent quality or in the quality of the translation into Chinese), but they suggest more work is needed to fully understand the source of anti-foreign outcomes for applicants.

The authors are not alone in looking at differential treatment by national patent offices.  Using data on about 50,000 patent applications granted by the USPTO and filed in the years 1990–1995 at the EPO and the JPO, Prof. Elizabeth Webster and colleagues (then at the University of Melbourne, Australia) had found that domestic applicants were more likely than foreign applicants to be granted patent protection, after certain normalizing adjustments. The authors in another paper noted that despite the efforts then subsisting of the trilateral offices (and other supporting efforts under the umbrella of patent harmonization), there is significant disharmony in the patent application outcomes across the trilateral patent offices. For instance, the overall rejection rate for patent applications which have been granted by the USPTO was 25 per cent for the JPO and 5 per cent for the EPO.  Webster and her co-authors note that there are numerous reasons why patent application outcome may vary with priority country status.  In light of recent changes in US practice due to Supreme Court decisions, one may also wonder whether differences in examination in certain areas, such as software-enabled inventions and biotechnology can also skew results in favor or local companies who have more up to the date information, are focused on the domestic market and may even have attracted capital upon the expectation of a local patent grant.

The papers on Chinese patent applications however are notable in that they (a) utilized a larger cohort of patent applications, (b) made comparisons in treatment by one office (SIPO) and (c) analyzed such treatment in light of articulated national industrial policies, and in comparison to treatment where no such national industrial policy is implicated.   The papers may suggest that political pressure, when it exists in China, may be more likely where there are clear national interests at stake rather in any matter in which a foreigner is involved.  Indeed, litigation data suggests that foreigners do well in Chinese courts; there is limited research on litigation outcomes when the subject is a matter of an articulated national industrial policy, such as these studies might suggest.

Written by Gaetan de Rasenfosse, edited by Mark Cohen.

The views expressed herein are the author’s own.