China Esquire

Yet another China IP case where the company suing to enforce IPR’s has won. Everyone “knows” China is weak on IP enforcement, but the reality is that the Chinese courts have been getting better and better. (See e.g., G2000 case covered here) Score another one for the continued development of Chinese IP enforcement: a patent suit from Motorola.

From a press release by the company ( h/t to China Tech News) dated today:

Motorola, Inc. (NYSE: MOT), today announced that in 2007 it filed a lawsuit against a Chinese company known as Guangzhou Weierwei Electronic Science and Technology Co. Ltd. (Weirwei). The lawsuit related to the Chinese Company’s two-way radio model number VEV3188 that was claimed to fall within the scope of a Motorola Chinese Design Patent.

In a ruling last December, the First Intermediate People’s Court of Beijing (the court in the first instance) determined that the VEV 3188 two-way radio infringed Motorola’s Design Patent. Weierwei was therefore ordered to cease the manufacture and sales of VEV 3188 two-way radios and to financially compensate Motorola.

“We are very pleased that the First Intermediate People’s Court of Beijing recognizes the importance of intellectual property protection and has ruled in Motorola’s favor,” said Jonathan P. Meyer, Motorola senior vice president for Intellectual Property Law. “Motorola invests extensive human and financial resources to bring compelling designs to market, and the company will remain vigilant in protecting the value of this investment”.

We now have trademark cases and a patent case within the span of a month coming out of various Chinese courts. This is good for businesses wanting to go into China. Wonderful.

So maybe you’re asking yourself the next question: what’s the catch? The catch is that while Motorola is trumping this decision, we have no idea how much the damages were. We know there was an injunction, which is standard fare. (though I guess the defendant could always go and start another company doing the same thing fairly quickly) There was also monetary damages. And we are all dying to know what they are. I have a feeling they were within the 500,000 yuan cap or Motorola would be trumpeting the damages as well.

While we don’t know the results (and I hope Brad Luo or Danny Friedman post about this soon), I suspect its this way: low IPR damages 2, high IPR damages 1. We’ll see how the game develops though.

UPDATE: Stan Abrams has also done a post on this with a more hopeful tone than I. Here are some of his thoughts:

For those of you who care about these things, take note of three details: first, although the defendant is a Guangzhou company, the case was heard by Beijing’s 1st Intermediate Court (the IP department, one would assume). Good reason for coming up here to litigate instead of trying it in Guangzhou, including the threat of local protectionism.

Second, notice the underlying IP at issue here, a design patent. For all of you who deride these things as “junk patents,” remember that a design is just as good as any other kind of IP as long as it isn’t invalidated. I assume this one was robust and did not have any pesky novelty problems or other skeletons in its proverbial closet.

Third, and unless there was a typo somewhere, the case was filed in 2007 and adjudicated the same year! Yes, this is possible if the case was simple and there was no appeal, although I’m still quite impressed. The article does not mention if an appeal is likely, so we’ll have to wait and see.

UPDATE II: Dan Harris has also just weighed in (emphasis added) on topic,

At the conference, one of the speakers (not a lawyer) mentioned that the most important thing one must do to protect IP in China is to hire “a really good lawyer.” I then said that it is even more important to actually register one’s IP and then I talked very about briefly on how companies sometimes make the mistake of thinking that registering their IP in the United States or in the EU covers them in China as well.

So register your IP in China. That’s solid advice for all businesses.

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