Court cases indicate better IPR protection

For most intellectual property rights (IPR) infringements in China, IPR owners can choose to lodge complaints with administrative agencies or sue in the local courts. But while administrative agencies continue to handle a large portion of IPR infringements, taking cases to court has been a growing trend in recent years, particularly for significant and complex cases.

For example, trademark infringement cases handled by the local administrations for industry and commerce have been fairly stable in terms of numbers: 50,534 in 2006, 50,318 in 2007, 56,634 in 2008, and 51,044 in 2009, with around one-fifth of them filed by foreign parties.

However, there has been a huge increase in the number of trademark infringement cases filed with the courts - 2,521 in 2006, 3,855 in 2007, 6,233 in 2008, and 6,906 in 2009. And that trend is still continuing, as 8,480 cases were taken to court in 2010, a 22.5 percent increase on 2009, according to the White Paper on Judicial Protection of Intellectual Property issued by the Supreme People's Court on April 12, 2011.