NOVEMBER 2007
When sorry isn't enough
Recent damages awards demonstrate that Chinese courts will compensate IP owners for their losses, reports Emma Barraclough
Many foreign companies have heard horror stories about IP enforcement in China. In boardrooms across the US and Europe, business people and their legal advisers imagine that China is full of corrupt judges, paid off by local factory bosses whose workers churn out infringing products while local enforcement officials turn a blind eye. If they were lucky enough to be awarded damages in a civil trial, believe many, then they would only receive a trivial amount of compensation – and even then, they would be unlikely to be able to make the infringer pay up. As a result, many do not bother to protect their own IP in China, believing it to be effectively unenforceable.
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