Patent Litigation in China: Protecting Rights or the Local Economy?
Patent Litigation in China: Protecting Rights or the Local Economy?
复制标题
中国的专利诉讼：保护权利还是地方经济？
DOI：
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发表时间：
2016
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
M. Eberhardt
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
B. Love;C. Helmers;M. Eberhardt
尽管直到1985年中国还没有专利制度，但现在中国在专利申请量和诉讼数量上都处于世界领先地位。尽管中国的专利制度迅速崛起，但许多西方人认为，它主要是促进地方保护主义，而不是创新。最近，相对不知名的中国公司对苹果、三星和戴尔等知名外国科技公司提起了备受瞩目的专利诉讼，这只会火上浇油。令人惊讶的是，鉴于有关中国保护主义的断言是多么司空见惯，几乎没有经验证据支持它们。本文通过分析中国50个最活跃的知识产权（IP）诉讼案件的5年数据（2006- 2011），对这一主题的文献做出贡献。除此之外，我们发现中国的专利诉讼高度集中在少数几个主要的城市司法管辖区，而不是在最常被指控发生保护主义的内陆小城市，而且成功率和上诉率与美国的专利诉讼非常相似。我们还观察到，在中国的专利诉讼中，外国公司最常以专利执行者的身份出现，而不是被指控的侵权者，而且胜诉的几率与中国专利权人大致相当。最后，我们发现，在中国提起诉讼的专利在提出主张时通常已经存在5年以上，并且经常有外国专利局颁发的家庭成员。综上所述，这些发现与传统观点相悖，即中国专利制度的结构是以牺牲外国公司为代价，使国内产业受益。
Though it lacked a patent system until 1985, China is now the world leader in patent filings and litigation. Despite the meteoric rise of the Chinese patent system, many in the West believe that it acts primarily to facilitate local protectionism rather than innovation. Recent high-profile patent suits filed by relatively unknown Chinese firms against high-profile foreign tech companies, like Apple, Samsung, and Dell, have only added fuel to the fire. Surprisingly, given how commonplace assertions of Chinese protectionism are, little empirical evidence exists to support them. This Article contributes to the literature on this topic by analyzing five years' of data (2006-11) on patent suits litigated in courts with the fifty most active intellectual property (IP) dockets in China. Among other things, we find that Chinese patent suits are highly concentrated in a handful of major urban jurisdictions — not in smaller inland cities where protectionism is most often alleged to take place — and also have rates of success and appeal very similar to those of US patent suits. We also observe that foreign companies appear in Chinese patent suits most often as patent enforcers, not as accused infringers, and win their cases roughly as often as Chinese patentees. Finally, we find that patents litigated in China are generally more than five years old at the time of assertion and frequently have family members issued by foreign patent offices. Together, these findings contradict conventional wisdom that China’s patent system has been structured to benefit domestic industry at the expense of foreign firms.