Tag: patent

China Understands the Strategic Value of Intellectual Property. Does the United States?

By on • ( Leave a comment )

Why does China increasingly treat intellectual property as a strategic instrument of national development, international influence, and global governance while the United States often continues to view it primarily through the lens of enforcement and compliance? Building on my recent article with former USPTO Director David Kappos in The National Interest, this essay argues that intellectual property should be viewed as a central issue of foreign policy rather than as a specialized area of law. Recent Chinese writings emphasize the development of an indigenous intellectual property knowledge system and greater international “discourse power,” while U.S. policy remains focused on criminal enforcement campaigns and “IP theft.” If the United States wishes to preserve a market-oriented international intellectual property system, it must modernize its own laws, renew engagement with China’s civil IP institutions, emphasize transparency and private rights, and recognize that competition increasingly extends to the institutions, concepts, and norms that will govern the future of innovation.

Measuring FRAND Value in ZTE v. Samsung

By on • ( Leave a comment )

China’s recent global FRAND determination in ZTE v. Samsung has attracted attention because it valued ZTE’s SEP portfolio at nearly twice the level of a contemporaneous English court decision. This article argues that the more important issue is not the royalty rate itself, but the methodology used to measure technological contribution. The Chongqing court relied heavily on declared SEP-family shares, portfolio metrics, territorial weighting, and other quantitative indicators that are closely associated with longstanding Chinese innovation policies encouraging patent accumulation, standards participation, and portfolio expansion. By comparing the decision to earlier Chinese FRAND jurisprudence, the English Samsung decision, USPTO research, and broader debates over Chinese patent statistics, the article explores whether these metrics accurately measure technological contribution or instead reward portfolio scale and geographic concentration. The case may signal an important shift in Chinese FRAND adjudication from disputes over the meaning of FRAND to a deeper debate over how FRAND value itself should be measured.

Post-Filing Data in Chinese Pharma Patents: Why It Took So Long — and What Finally Worked

By on • ( Leave a comment )

Recently, the Supreme People’s Court of China (SPC) upheld a decision of the Beijing Intellectual Property Court reversing a China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) invalidation decision and confirming the validity of Novo Nordisk’s semaglutide compound patent. Although the final written decision has not yet been publicly released, official summaries indicate that the court accepted post-filing experimental data where “the technical effect can be derived from the original specification” (技术效果可由原说明书得出), reversing an administrative invalidation decision. Public reporting further indicates that the dispute turned on whether CNIPA would accept post-filing experimental data demonstrating semaglutide’s surprising pharmacokinetic effects in animal models, where the application as filed contained no experimental data.