Patent Amendments ©(Part II of II)

The Greater China IP Updates ĄV May 2025

By Lyndon

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China Issues IP Enforcement Report

China’s Supreme People’s Court released a Status of Judicial Protection of Intellectual Property Rights in Chinese Courts (2024) on April 21, 2025. The report stated that IP enforcement continues to grow with Chinese courts receiving 9,120 first-instance criminal cases involving infringement on IP and concluding 9,003 such cases, marking increases of 24.34% and 29.22% compared to 2023, respectively. Overall, Chinese courts received 529,370 IP cases and concluded 543,911 cases, representing a decrease of 2.67% and an increase of 0.001% respectively over 2023. In addition, the report stated that punitive damages were applied in 460 cases involving seriously malicious infringement, marking a year on year increase of 44.2%. Newly received patent cases totaled 44,255, down 1.02% compared to the previous year. Trademark cases numbered 124,918, down 4.95% from the previous year. Copyright cases amounted to 247,149, down 1.8% compared to 2023. Technology contract cases reached 8,320, up 28.16% year on year. Competition-related cases totaled 10,567, up 3.29% year on year. Other types of civil IP disputes amounted to 14,714, down 16.53% year on year. Chinese courts accepted 20,849 administrative IP cases of the first instance and 27,745 were concluded, showing increases of 1.29% and 24.19% from 2023, respectively.

China Launches Campaign to Protect IP Rights for AI

In April 2025, China’s Cyberspace Administration (CAC) announced the beginning of a 3-month campaign to deal with the abuse of AI technology. The first phase was aimed at illegal AI products, focusing attention on actions such as cloning or editing other people’s voices or images without authorization or consent, while infringing on other people’s privacy. The crackdown also looked at the teaching and selling of illegal AI product tutorials and products. Teaching tutorial information on how to use illegal AI products to forge face-changing videos and voice-changing audio will be eliminated along with the sale of illegal speech synthesizers and face-changing tools as well as their marketing, hyping and illegal promotion. More effort will be put into the supervision of IP rights and privacy rights by training the relevant personnel at the management level. Emphasis will be put on how to avoid using information that infringes on other people’s IP rights, privacy rights, as well as avoiding using false, invalid, and untrue content scraped from the internet. The topic of security management measures was also discussed. Failure to establish content review, intent recognition and other security measures that are commensurate with the scale of the business, failure to establish an effective illegal account management mechanism, failure to conduct regular security self-assessments were flagged. Since social platforms are unclear about the AI automatic reply and other services accessed through API interfaces, they do not strictly control them. Protocols to deal with this issue will be worked up in due course.

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