This year, April 26 marks the 24th World Intellectual Property Day. On April 25, the Supreme People's Procuratorate issued the White Paper on Intellectual Property Prosecution Work (2021-2023), which comprehensively summarized the comprehensive performance of duties in the past three years and systematically presented the main achievements of intellectual property prosecution reform. According to the white paper, from 2021 to 2023, the number of people accepted by procuratorial organs across the country for review and prosecution of intellectual property infringement crimes increased from 22,000 to 30,700. The number of cases has increased significantly. In 2023, the number of copyright infringement crimes and trade secret infringement crimes will increase by 1.4 times and 96.6% year-on-year, respectively, which is significantly higher than the overall number of intellectual property infringement crimes.
According to reports, since 2021, the Supreme People's Procuratorate has formulated 13 procuratorial policies to protect and promote the development of scientific and technological productivity, and explored the establishment of a new mechanism for intellectual property prosecution and case handling to support comprehensive innovation. Focus on high-tech fields that are related to the survival and development of enterprises, increase the intensity of case handling, and severely crack down on criminal acts of infringing on intellectual property rights of key core technologies. From 2021 to 2023, a total of 862 people were accepted, reviewed, and prosecuted for trade secret infringement crimes.
In terms of punishing malicious litigation of intellectual property rights in accordance with the law, since July 2022, the Supreme People's Procuratorate has deployed and carried out special supervision of malicious litigation of intellectual property rights across the country, actively participated in the joint management of prominent problems such as malicious preemptive registration and trademark hoarding, and guided Guangdong, Beijing, Zhejiang, Hunan and other places to handle a number of malicious litigation supervision cases. By the end of 2023, procuratorial organs across the country had supervised 6,144 retrials by courts and transferred 153 suspected criminal leads by submitting prosecutorial counter-appeals and formulating and issuing procuratorial recommendations for retrials. The State Intellectual Property Office has invalidated 129 trademarks involving Olympic symbols and the names of martyrs on the basis of malicious registration clues transferred by the Supreme People's Procuratorate.
The white paper shows that in recent years, the effectiveness of civil and administrative supervision by procuratorial organs has been significantly improved. The number of intellectual property civil and administrative litigation supervision cases has increased significantly year by year, with a year-on-year increase of 3.1 times in 2021, a year-on-year increase of 72.2% in 2022, and a year-on-year increase of 1.7 times in 2023 to 2,508 cases. In 2023, 726 procuratorial suggestions for protests and retrials were submitted in the supervision of effective civil judgments, an increase of 8.1 times year-on-year.
In addition, in 2023, rights holders filed 636 civil lawsuits attached to criminal cases, an increase of 22.6 times year-on-year, effectively making up for the loss of rights holders' interests while reducing the burden of litigation, and achieving the goal of "settling criminal cases".
Source: People's Daily client
