PRC Bill for Amendments to the Patent Law (Draft)
中华人民共和国专利法修正案 (草案)
January 16, 2019 | BY
Susan MokPatent infringement penalties will be increased
Issued: January 4, 2019
Main contents: The Draft proposes the following changes:
Where a patentee states to the State Council's patent administrative department in writing that it is willing to license the exploitation of its patent to anyone and expressly lays out the method and rate for the payment of royalties, the State Council's patent administrative department shall announce the same and implement an open license. Anyone who wishes to exploit an open-license patent secures a license to exploit such patent once he/she notifies the patentee thereof in writing and pays the royalties by the method and at the rate specified in the announcement (Articles 10 and 11).
Where a patent is willfully infringed and the circumstances thereof are serious, the measure of damages that the court has the discretion to determine, in the case where the same is impossible to calculate, is increased from the Rmb10,000 to Rmb1 million specified in the current Patent Law to Rmb100,000 to Rmb5 million (Article 18).
A patent holder or a materially interested party may, on the strength of an effective judgment, ruling or written mediation statement from a people's court or a decision ordering the halting of infringement rendered by a department that manages patent work, notify an online service provider to take necessary measures such as deletion, masking and severing of the links to the infringing products, and if the online service provider fails to take the necessary measure in a timely manner, it shall bear joint and several liability (Article 17).
If an applicant files, within six months from the date on which it first filed a patent application in China for a design, a patent application in China in respect of the same subject matter, it shall be entitled to the right of priority (Article 5).
The term of protection for design patents is increased from the 10 years as specified in the current Patent Law to 15 years (Article 7).
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