Honda Motor has asserted two patents against Chinese carmaker Great Wall Motors, according to a recent announcement by the Beijing IP Court. The Beijing IP Court said it had accepted the two suits in a statement made on 31st January, but it appears that the cases may have been first filed as far back as October. The Japanese automaker is demanding over 200 million yuan ($32m) in damages for the infringement of two invention patents, both filed in 2006. The first is titled “Hatchback door structure for vehicles” and has just a Japanese counterpart. The second, covering “Garnish attachment structure of vehicle body”, has family members in the US and Europe as well.
It is not the first time that Honda asserted patents right in China. A design patent dispute against Shuang Huan Automobile it initiated in 2003 went to the Supreme People’s Court (SPC), where Honda lost. (See judgment (2014)民三终字第8号)
Rhodium Group in partnership with the Asia Society Policy Institute released the Winter 2018 edition of the China Dashboard, a project designed to gauge China’s implementation of its self-stated reform goals in the 10 policy domains it judges essential to long-term growth potential. According to the report, Beijing continues to prioritize high growth by deferring implementation of its comprehensive economic reform program. The bulk of Chinese reform priorities – 8 out of 10 areas of the Dashboard – show little or no forward movement. However, “innovation continues to show positive movement, but by using industrial policies favoring domestic players that are fomenting strong push back from Western policymaking.”
The report predicts that Chinese innovation is rapidly catching up to US levels in its role in the domestic economy: “China will catch up to the 2011–2014 levels of U.S. contribution from innovative industries to the industrial structure in the quarters ahead. Based on our methodology, structural adjustment toward innovation is taking place in China, backstopped by serious policies for both promoting innovation and suppressing sunset industries.” Of particular note were innovations in the auto sector, ICT and instruments and meters. More details on innovation policy reform are available here.
IPRdaily, a Chinese site dedicated to IP news, together with incoPat, an innovation research indexing center, recently released a report on global blockchain patents. The report (in Chinese) shows Alibaba leaping to pole position for the number of patents publicly published globally in 2017 across all three patent types (invention, design, and utility). Out of the top 100 companies 49 were Chinese, 23 from the US.
In second place is Bank of America with 33 new patents taking its total to 44. Third place went to another Chinese organization, the PBoC’s Digital Currency Research Institute (中国人民银行数字货币研究所) which also published 33 patents despite only opening in June 2017.
4.The Status Quo of NPE Litigation in China
IPHouse, a leading product and service provider of IP law in China reported an article written by King & Wood Mallesons on the status quo of NPE litigation in China. The article describes the various types of NPE’s in China, including: research-based NPE, conversion NPE, intermediary NPE and litigation NPE. Of particular interest is 深圳中科院知识产权投资有限公司 (Translation: Shenzhen Chinese Academy of Sciences IP Investment Company Ltd., or CASIP) is a research-based NPE under the Chinese Academy of Sciences which aims to commercialize the intellectual property of Chinese Academy of Sciences. CASIP’s website may be suggestive of its goals: “Cash IP” – http://www.caship.ac.cn/. CASIP brought a patent infringement lawsuit against Cree last year. The article describes the case as a battle between the “great research capacity of the Chinese Academy of Sciences” and the American “LED industry giant” Cree. But overall, NPEs’ activities in China are minimum. The article’s author expects NPEs to become more active in China in the near future.
