China's intellectual property protection embraces high-quality development

Law enforcement officials with the administration for market regulation of Fushan District, Yantai, east China's Shandong Province investigate into a trademark infringement case at a cosmetics shop, April 26, 2020. (People's Daily Online/Sun Wentan)

After years of development, China has accumulated rich resources of intelligent property (IP), becoming a genuine patent power, and its IP work is going through a transition from the pursuit for quantity toward high-quality development.

The country has ranked the first in the world for consecutive years in terms of total IP volume, such as patents and trademarks, and acquired large batches of core patents in high-speed rail, nuclear power and 5G.

As of the end of October 2020, China had nearly 2.97 million valid invention patents, or 15.2 per 10,000 population.

In recent years, China has made a series of decisions and deployment on intelligent property rights (IPR) protection, such as enhancing top-level design, improving relevant laws and regulations, reforming institutions and mechanisms and reinforcing judicial and administrative protection.

The country released an action plan to implement national IP strategy spanning from 2014 to 2020, established the State Administration for Market Regulation, and reorganized China National Intellectual Property Administration. Besides, it set up IP courts in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, and the Supreme People's Court also established an IPR court to hear relevant appeals.

According to the 2020 edition of the Global Innovation Index issued by the World Intellectual Property Organization, China ranks 14th among the 131 economies involved.

In 2020, China concluded 466,000 IPR cases of first instance, up 11.7 percent year on year, and the compensation for IPR-related offenses also surged 79.3 percent from a year ago, said a work report of the Supreme People's Court.

It's noteworthy that to improve IPR mechanism has been listed as an independent chapter in China's 14th Five-Year Plan, which demonstrates the country's resolution to intensify IPR efforts.

Apart from institutional guarantee, China is also enhancing the application of AI, big data and other information technologies in IP reviewing and protection by reinforcing informationized and smart infrastructure, so as to push for integrated online-offline development of IPR.

Antchain, a global leader in blockchain under China's Alibaba Group, has made some IPR attempts based on the blockchain technology of the Alibaba DAMO Academy.

On Oct. 22, 2020, the company launched a one-stop digital platform of IP services. Relying on the tamper proof character of the blockchain and private protection technology, the platform offers instant IP verification for original content providers, which largely lowers the difficulty of ownership certification, effectively prevents the incidence of infringement disputes, and makes it easier to handle such disputes.

Bayuegua is a Beijing-based company in the IPR sector. It has established a platform called Innovative Brain based on AI and big data technologie. The platform offers a series of IP identification and protection services such as information analysis before, during and after R&D, IPR application and IP trade, technology translation and transfer, sci-tech consultation, technological due diligence, and technological finance.

So far, the Innovative Brain has collected nearly 140 million pieces of patent data from 110 countries, organizations and regions, and is offering technological and marketing information for enterprises with over 200 search fields.