사례를 통해 보는 중국 지적재산권 보호현황

Current Status of Chinese IPR protection -Top IP Cases Selected by Supreme Court of China-

With regard to the current status of Chinese IPR protection, there are two perspectives with significant difference. One of them sees China as the kingdom of fake goods. This view is rather conventional and maybe still valid. However, this view does not reflect the rapid change of Chinese IPR law, IPR protection policies and the huge amount of the effort that the Chinese government and people are spending on IPR. The other perspective is to see China as one of the nations with strong IPR. This view is based on the glamourous number regarding Chinese IPR such as the recent number of application of Chinese patent or PCT. However, this view tends to be a rosy colored prospective rather than a realistic analysis of the current status. There are some explanations why there is such a huge difference between the two perspectives. One of the reason is that the status of the economy and the level of development of law system are very different depending on the area in China. Another reason is the insufficiency of public materials of current status of IPR protection. Moreover, not every judgments are public nor easily available in China. Fortunately, every year the Supreme Court of China releases the top 10 IPR cases. Under these circumstances, studying Chinese top IPR cases is one of the most efficient method to diagnose the actual status of IPR at present. It also helps to understand the Chinese people's general conception of IPR because the top cases are selected based on the significance of public attention. In this article, 3 copyright cases, 2 trade mark cases and 1 patent case among recently released top Chinese cases are introduced. The context, the result and the reasoning of these major cases are explained and analyzed. Also the related Chinese and Korean cases are explained and compared.