Xia Wu
On December 5th, the State Council passed The Amendment of Chinese Patent Law (Draft). The Amendment aims at enhancing the crackdown on infringement of intellectual property rights, significantly increasing the cost of infringement, and deterring illegal activities, and proposes the following measures: substantially increasing the amount of damages and fines of willful infringement and counterfeiting patents, clarifying the burden of proof for infringers to provide relevant information, and confirming network service providers who fail to prevent the infringement in a timely manner must bear joint liability. It also clarifies the incentive mechanism for the inventor or designer to share the benefits of service invention-creation and improves the patent authorization system. The Amendment will be submitted to the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress for deliberation.
