Tannet reads from China Daily that the Guangdong Provincial Higher People's Court handled 71,000 intellectual property rights (IPR) cases in 2017, up 64.7 percent from the previous year.
According to a white paper on IPR protection in Guangdong published by the court on Monday, disputes over patents, copyrights and unfair competition have grown rapidly as has the amount of damages paid to rights holders.
Average damages in trademark and copyright cases have grown by 25 percent and 50 percent, respectively, since three years ago.
In 2017, a Shenzhen-based garment company was ordered to pay three million yuan ($476,000) in damages after the court ruled that it infringed the trademark rights of Burberry.
The IPR market is booming in Guangdong, which is an economic powerhouse in China. In 2017, the GDP of the province was 9 trillion yuan, accounting for around 10 percent of the national total.
Chinese customs took tough measures against intellectual property rights (IPR) infringement last year. Customs authorities seized more than 19,000 shipments of goods suspected of IPR infringement in 2017, involving nearly 41 million individual items, according to the General Administration of Customs (GAC).
Over 98 percent of the goods were involved in trademark infringement. The value of those involved in patent infringement rose 41.2 percent year on year.
Most of the seized goods were transported by sea, and through customs offices in eastern coastal regions.
The GAC data showed that authorities seized nearly 13 million items suspected of IPR infringement of domestic enterprises last year, up 70.8 percent. (Source: China Daily)
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