China will accelerate the establishment of a State level mechanism for appeals and hearings on intellectual property (IP) cases, Tao Kaiyuan, vice-president of the Supreme People's Court of China (SPC), announced on Thursday.
A total of 237,242 new IP related cases were received by courts in China and 225,678 cases, including preserved ones, were closed in 2017, marking respective increases of 33.5 and 31.43 percent compared with 2016, according to data released at a SPC press conference for "Publicity Week of Juridical Protection for Intellectual Property" on Thursday.
Disputes in new industries, such as online live streaming of sports events, brought up many problems that needed to be solved urgently, Song Xiaoming, chief justice of the Civil Adjudication Tribunal No.3 of SPC, said at the press event.
"New-type and difficult IP cases, including high-tech patent cases, copyright disputes, and IP disputes related to the entertainment industry, saw a great increase in number," Song added.
Nonetheless, the number of closed cases rose sharply and there was a large increase in the number of cases that were settled or dropped, while there was a great reduction in retrial cases, according to the SPC website.
Tao continued to note that the SPC was striving to solve the problem of a lack of deterrence by increasing financial sanctions for IP rights violations.
Previously, the compensation for the trademark infringement case of Huiyuan, a Chinese juice giant, was raised from three million yuan ($478,813) to 10 million yuan in the second trial in February, news site Thepaper.cn reported on Thursday.
