SHANGHAI: The city's courts are seeing a rise in intellectual property rights (IPR) cases involving overseas parties due to the growing presence of foreign capital in the economy, statistics from the Shanghai People's Court indicate.

In 2006, the city's courts heard 972 IPR infringement cases, a 6.7 percent increase from the previous year. Among them, 217 were related to overseas enterprises or individuals, representing 17.6 percent of the total.

Zhu Dan, the presiding judge of the courts' IPR team, said the percentage is normally less than 10.

The number of IPR violations that faced charges increased 18.6 percent from last year to 70.

Nearly 70 percent of them involved trademark violations.

The court did not indicate how many of those violations involved foreign trademarks. But statistics from the Shanghai Administration for Industry and Commerce show that violations of foreign trademarks 1,569 in total constituted 75.6 percent of the total in 2006.

The infringed-upon brands were from the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan and Germany, and included Levi Strauss, Nike and Adidas.

Yesterday, American jeans maker Levi Strauss & Co and Japanese automaker Honda were in court to claim compensation for trademark infringement.

Levi Strauss is suing one of its former distributors in Shanghai for selling counterfeits.

According to Honda, the accused Chongqing Lifan Group and its Shanghai partner, Wen'an Company, copied Honda's patent appearance design in a motorcycle the companies manufactured.

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