On October 16, 2019, the Beijing Intellectual Property Court released a Summary of their adjudicated IP cases involving foreigners. The Summary reveals that foreign entities and individuals play a growing and substantial role among those cases adjudicated during the period from the establishment of the court in November 2014 to the first half of 2019.
Since the establishment of the court, the Beijing Intellectual Property Court has accepted 13,736 IP cases involving foreigners (excluding Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan), accounting for 21.1% of the total number of cases. During the same period, a total of 10,755 foreigner-related cases were concluded, accounting for 20.7% of the total. The number of foreigner-related cases increased year by year, with an average annual growth of about 8.4% in received cases and an average annual growth of about 40.4% in concluded cases.
In terms of geographical distribution of the concluded cases, 90 countries and regions (excluding Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan) are involved, among which the cases involving US entities or individuals take the largest percentage, accounting for 33.2%; the cases involving German entities or individuals account for 10.3%, the cases involving Japanese entities or individuals account for 8.8%; those involving European Union countries account for 39.3%.
In the administrative cases involving foreigners, the winning rate of foreign parties is 49% (excluding the situation where both the plaintiff and the third party are foreigners); in the civil cases, the winning rate of foreign parties is 68% (excluding the situation where both the plaintiff and the defendant are foreigners).
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