Beijing Courts Top China in Intellectual Property AdjudicationCourts at all levels in this Chinese capital had adjudicated 3,617 intellectual property cases by Wednesday, sources at the Higher People's Court of Beijing said Thursday, the first World Intellectual Property Day.China's first intellectual property court began operation in Beijing in August 1993, and now there are five such courts in the city. These courts basically accept and hear civil cases, including disputes about patents, trademarks, copyrights, technological contracts, scientific results and unfair competition, according to sources. Judgment of intellectual property disputes is a new field worldwide, and the courts in Beijing, the country's economic, technological and commercial center, have handled lots of unprecedented cases concerning intellectual property. Up to now, Beijing courts have decided 120 cases concerning the Internet, ranking first in the country, and also created many judicial precedents for the country's legal practice in this field, officials said. In early 1999, Beijing Ruide Online sued the Oriental Information Company, in Yibin in southwest China's Sichuan Province, for impingement of its copyrights on websites, and claimed compensation of 199,900 yuan (about 24,100 U.S. dollars). The case, the first one concerning Internet copyright in China, was heard in Beijing. In the same year, Beijing's Haidian District People's Court gave a verdict on the country's first lawsuit involving an Internet trademark dispute. Last year, the No. 2 Intermediate People's Court of Beijing judged the first case of music copyright on the Internet. An international phonograph association, IEPA, filed a lawsuit on behalf of its 1,400 member companies worldwide against several Chinese website companies for unauthorized links to MP3 websites for download service. The case was unprecedented, not only in China but also in the world. The court judges checked tens of thousands of words of information about the Internet, and consulted legal experts. The court gave a verdict that MP3 falls in the category of copyright and should be given legal protection. It ordered the Chinese websites to delete unauthorized links and stop such actions. The verdict had a global impact. On February 12 this year, the Ninth Court of Assizes of the United States delivered the same verdict in a similar case. New plant species are also a kind of intellectual property, similar to patents, and are named Plant Patents. China issued regulations on the protection of new plant species in October 1997. The Supreme People's Court has empowered the No. 2 Intermediate People's Court of Beijing, considered outstanding in the intellectual property field, to be the only court of first instance to hear disputes concerning five plant species, judicial sources said. |
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