Let "true innovation" be "truly protected"

Let "true innovation" be "truly protected"

-- A documentary on the development of intellectual property protection in Jiangsu courts

Innovative technologies give birth to new industries, new models, and new momentum, and promote high-quality development. The core of developing new quality productive forces lies in scientific and technological innovation.

In recent years, Jiangsu has continuously strengthened original innovation, made breakthroughs in key core technologies, and continuously optimized the environment for innovation and development. In 2023, the province will have a total of 51,000 high-tech enterprises, and the output value of high-tech industries will account for 49.9% of the industrial output above designated size. The added value of the core industries of the digital economy accounted for 11.4% of the regional GDP......

To protect intellectual property is to protect innovation. In order to strengthen the protection of original and disruptive scientific and technological innovation achievements, in September 2023, the Jiangsu Provincial High People's Court issued a relevant action plan, requiring intellectual property rights to strive to protect scientific and technological innovation achievements, strengthen the protection of the rights and interests of innovative subjects, promote the development of key industrial chains, maximize the innovation vitality of enterprises, and serve to ensure the realization of high-level scientific and technological self-reliance and self-reliance.

Strict protection, setting a record for the highest compensation for infringement of trade secrets

It takes 50 kilograms of rubber to produce a car and more than 800 kilograms to build a tank......

In life and industrial production, people's favor for rubber materials stems from its good physical and mechanical properties and chemical stability, and few people know that rubber also has a "secret weapon" to "maintain youth" - rubber antioxidants.

Sunon Chemical Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Sunon Chemical Technology Co., Ltd.) is a company that develops and produces this "secret weapon".

Since receiving the relevant process of producing rubber antioxidants, Sunon has continuously optimized the process, which can now reduce the manufacturing cost of rubber antioxidants by 30% and pollutant emissions by 90%, and the antioxidant production project has achieved fully enclosed continuous production, becoming a green route. Tested by Michelin Japan Quality Inspection Center, Sunon brand 4020 antioxidant fully meets the quality requirements of Michelin, and Sunon has also ranked among the world's top rubber antioxidant manufacturers by virtue of this process, and has long ranked first in the revenue of China's rubber additives enterprises.

Just when the company was booming, Sunon discovered that the company's important technical secrets had been "stolen". Sunon immediately reported the case to the public security organs, and after investigation, it was found that the company that stole secrets lured an engineer of Sunon Company to steal the technical secrets involved in the case, and arranged for the company's employees to cooperate in the case to steal them. After stealing the technical secrets of Sunon's technological process and equipment manufacturing drawings, the company not only vigorously produced related products, but also used the stolen technical secrets to apply for patents.

After the conclusion of the criminal case, Sunon filed a civil lawsuit with the Jiangsu High Court.

The road to defending rights has not been easy. During the trial of the case, the infringer continued to obstruct the normal progress of the litigation procedure by filing for bankruptcy, reporting the case to the public security organ, and transferring the main production equipment. In 2022, the Jiangsu High Court made a civil judgment in the case, ordering the infringer to stop the infringement, destroy the infringing equipment, and compensate Sunon for economic losses and reasonable expenses totaling 201.54 million yuan, setting a record for the highest amount of damages awarded by a court in China for trade secret infringement.

In order to stop the infringer's heinous acts, the Jiangsu High People's Court immediately made a ruling on act preservation to prevent the rights holder's losses from further expanding.

"The technology involved in the case is the core technology in the key field. After full deliberation, the collegial panel held that the determination of the amount of compensation based on the reasonable license fee of the technical secrets involved in the case was in line with the provisions of the judicial interpretation and was reasonable, and fully supported Sunon's claim for compensation. Shi Naixing, the presiding judge of the case and vice president of the Intellectual Property Division of the Jiangsu High Court, talked about the idea of determining the amount of compensation in the case.

"True innovation" should be "truly protected", and "high quality" should be "strictly protected". In the case involving the dispute over the rights of a new plant variety of "Jinjing 818", taking into account factors such as the high original value of the rights of the new plant variety and the obvious subjective malice of the alleged infringer, the Nanjing Intellectual Property Court applied punitive damages and ordered the defendant to compensate the right holder for economic losses and reasonable expenses of RMB 2.25 million by taking three times the amount of compensation calculated by using factors such as sales unit price, profit, quantity and other factors as the final amount of compensation.

Define binding force and reasonably protect new achievements in the secondary research and development of open source code

"OfficeTen1800" software is the "trump card" software of Wangjing Technology (Suzhou) Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Wangjing). In order to develop the software, the company invested a lot of manpower and material resources, and finally obtained the copyright registration certificate in 2013. However, as employees move to companies in the same industry, companies in the same industry develop highly similar software.

The "trump card" of his own company has become someone else's "signboard". The company immediately filed a lawsuit with the Intermediate People's Court of Suzhou City, Jiangsu Province, requesting that the infringing company and some of its departing employees be ordered to immediately stop the infringing acts, publicly apologize, and compensate for economic losses and reasonable expenses totaling 3 million yuan.

According to the appraisal agency entrusted by the public security organs, the source code information of the 1800-c version of the accused software and the software involved in the case is highly similar, and the two are substantially similar. In the face of sufficient evidence of infringement, the accused infringer was convinced: the source code information claimed by Netjing itself is open source code, which was developed in accordance with the OpenWrt system software open source code agreement, and the copyright should belong to the original author of the OpenWrt system software.

Open source code refers to software source code that can be publicly viewed, used, modified, and distributed. The open source license agreement is an effective contract in the international software industry, which can better stimulate innovation to a certain extent, and is conducive to promoting the continuous open source dissemination of software source code.

Back to this case, the "OfficeTen1800" software was indeed developed on the basis of the open source code of the OpenWrt system software, but in the secondary development process, the company wrote more than 260,000 lines of source code, and set up multiple functions such as voice, firewall, QOS network optimization, VPN and other functions for the intelligent gateway product, so that the intelligent gateway can be widely used in government agencies, enterprises and institutions, and bring high-quality network access services to users. With such an original crystallization of wisdom, can you only watch others take it directly?

In order to further clarify the true meaning of the open source agreement, the judge of the Suzhou Intellectual Property Court carefully read the official Chinese and English versions of the open source agreement involved in the case. They believe that the connotation of open source protocol is to seek a balance between promoting code dissemination and protecting the interests of developers, and the ultimate goal is to achieve the healthy development of the software development ecological chain, and judicial protection should find the best balance.

The collegial panel finally reached an unanimous opinion: the fact that NetEconomics developed the software involved in the case is systematically and completely confirmed by the R&D records, and its original labor has been paid for the secondary development of open source products, so that the "OfficeTen1800" software is sufficient to constitute an independent work, and NetEconomics should enjoy its own copyright.

"Although the software rights holder has not opened the source under the open source license, this does not deprive or restrict the copyright enjoyed by the software developer based on his original contributions. In the process of developing the accused software, the infringer copied and modified the source code of the software involved in the case, infringing the copyright of the company. The judgment of the Suzhou Intermediate People's Court was upheld by the Supreme People's Court in the second instance, and the case was also rated as one of the 100 typical cases by the Intellectual Property Court of the Supreme Court for the fifth anniversary of its establishment.

Different from the existing rules, the judgment in this case grasps the binding force of the open source license agreement and defines the boundary between the rights of the open source code right holder and the secondary developer of the software, which shows that the new achievements of secondary research and development on the basis of open source code should be protected, and do not have to be completely subject to the clear orientation of the mandatory open source rules unilaterally formulated by foreign institutions. The verdict is of certain significance for stimulating innovation and promoting the healthy and standardized development of the software industry, and gives software developers a 'reassurance'. Zhao Xiaoqing, president of the Suzhou Intellectual Property Court, said of the verdict in the case.

The digital economy provides intelligent technical support for the development of new quality productivity and is an important driving factor for new quality productivity.

The reporter learned that Jiangsu has strengthened forward-looking research on intellectual property issues involving new technologies, new business forms and new models such as big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and algorithms, and promoted the deep integration of the digital economy and the real economy; The Jiangsu Higher People's Court also formulated the Administrative Measures for the Registration of Data Intellectual Property Rights in Jiangsu Province (for Trial Implementation) with the Provincial Intellectual Property Office and other units, and signed the Memorandum of Cooperation on Strengthening the Collaborative Protection of Data Intellectual Property Rights to promote the standardized development of data intellectual property registration, transactions, and applications, and to play a good role in serving the healthy development of the digital economy and promoting high-level digital justice.

Blocking malicious lawsuits, the little "spirit pigeon" returned to the Beijing Stock Exchange three months later

In some intellectual property cases, due to the complexity of the facts, the difficulty in ascertaining the facts, and the concealment of the defendant's infringement, the infringement is often continued during the trial of the case. In particular, some scientific and technological innovation enterprises at the forefront of the market have a short market cycle for rights, and once they miss the opportunity to protect their rights, it is easy to have a regrettable ending of "winning the lawsuit and losing the market".

"For new quality productivity, time is gold, application is gold, and market is gold, and judicial protection of intellectual property rights needs to be more timely and rainy." Tang Maoren, President of the Intellectual Property Division of the Jiangsu Higher People's Court, said.

Jiangsu courts have explored the adoption of act preservation measures ex officio, innovated the method of "advance judgment + temporary injunction", and implemented interlocutory judgments in cases with a long trial period, so as to avoid the damage to the legitimate rights and interests of the infringed party in the course of litigation from continuing to expand. For intellectual property cases involving a short life cycle in the rights market, expedited adjudication, mediation, small claims litigation, and speeding up the pace of trial are used to achieve expedited trial and quick conclusion.

The market share should be fast, and the market should not be chaotic.

"To develop new quality productive forces, we must purify and develop the ecology." Yuan Tao, vice president of the Intellectual Property Division of the Jiangsu Higher People's Court, said that not all plaintiffs file lawsuits to protect their legitimate rights and interests, and some so-called rights holders are "menacing", in fact, to use litigation to achieve their ulterior purposes, and some even to suppress the defendant commercially or try to get through the test to obtain high compensation.

Under this attempt, Wuxi Lingge Machinery Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Lingge Company) "hit". Lingge company is a material automation processing solution provider, through years of independent research and development, in the measurement, transmission, automation control and other key links to form independent research and development of the core technology, access to a number of invention patents, is certified as a national specialized and new "little giant" enterprise, Jiangsu Province high-tech enterprises. In 2023, Lingge Company is in full swing to prepare for listing on the Beijing Stock Exchange, and at this time, the company received a summons from the Wuxi Intermediate People's Court.

The plaintiff's name is not unfamiliar to the company. The "defender" is a company engaged in intelligent equipment in Guangdong, and it is the "peer" of the Lingge company. The other party was conclusive, claiming that Lingge Company had infringed one of its utility model patents and claimed economic losses of 23 million yuan. Considering that the major litigation is likely to affect the company's credit assessment and thus make the listing plan fall short, Lingge Company filed a counterclaim while responding to the lawsuit, claiming that the other party was a malicious lawsuit.

After taking over the case, the Wuxi Intellectual Property Court judged that it was a premeditated commercial competition by reading the case file, fully listening to the statements of both parties, and verifying more and more evidence, and the litigation became a "tool" used by the right holder to gain a competitive advantage.

"The plaintiff knew very well that the defendant's products did not constitute infringement, and deliberately filed a lawsuit at a critical time when Lingge Company was in the listing and cultivation period, in order to force Lingge Company to suspend the listing review and hinder its listing process, so as to profit from commercial competition." Lu Chao, president of the Wuxi Intellectual Property Court, said when reviewing the trial process of the case.

During the trial of the case, Lingge Company had no choice but to apply to the Beijing Stock Exchange for suspension of listing review, and the listing was forced to be suspended. In order to minimize the impact on Lingge, the Wuxi Intermediate People's Court made a judgment in a timely manner, finding that the plaintiff knew that the patent evaluation report of the State Intellectual Property Office had determined that the patent claims involved in the case were not inventive, but deliberately concealed the evaluation report when filing the lawsuit, and chose to file a lawsuit at the critical time when Lingge Company was listed, and deliberately raised the claim amount to meet the minimum standards required by the Information Disclosure Rules, so that Lingge Company had to disclose and suspend the listing review, which constituted a malicious lawsuit. It was decided that a company in Guangdong issued a statement to eliminate the impact and compensated Lingge Company for reasonable expenses of 400,000 yuan.

It took only 100 days from the filing of the case to the verdict, and only 42 days from the filing of the counterclaim to the verdict.

Only in the soil of integrity can we bear the fruits of innovation. The development of new quality productivity is inseparable from a clean and orderly market ecology.

The reporter learned from an interview with the Intellectual Property Division of the Jiangsu High Court that in recent years, the provincial court has actively strengthened intellectual property governance, and effectively regulated dishonest behaviors such as malicious preemptive registration, hoarding of trademarks, "patent pirates", "patent cockroaches", malicious litigation, and litigation raids on the listing of competitors' science and technology enterprises by submitting a report on the construction of an intellectual property integrity system to the provincial party committee and exploring the establishment of a list of serious infringers.