China

On April 21 2020, Beijing High Court issued the guiding opinions on the determination of damages in cases of infringement of intellectual property rights and unfair competition as well as the judging standards for statutory compensation ("关于侵害知识产权及不正当竞争案件确定损害赔偿的指导意见及法定赔偿的裁判标准") (opinions).

On January 15 2020, US President Donald Trump and Chinese vice-premier He Liu signed a trade agreement which President Trump has described as "the biggest deal anybody has ever seen." The deal promises to be the first phase of a larger new trade agreement between the US and China, announcing a significant de-escalation in the trade war between the two giants that has dragged along for more than one year. Of particular interest to those in the pharmaceutical industry will be Sections C and D of the first chapter of the trade agreement, which outline China's commitments to improve protection and enforcement of pharmaceutical-related patent rights, and in particular to creating an effective mechanism for early resolution of patent disputes between generic drug companies and pharmaceutical innovators, or a Chinese drug patent linkage system, as many may like to put it.

Lin Li, Yujie Jin and Yali Shao of Liu Shen & Associates address the requirements AI inventions must meet in order to be protected under patent, trade secret and copyright law

The global COVID-19 pandemic is affecting the world in various ways. One of the lessons we have learnt from this traumatic period is that while people always tried to find value in cooperation rather than in rivalry, cooperation could be more fragile than expected, especially in a multilateral scenario.

Deqiang Zhu of CCPIT examines the different defences available in a patent infringement claim, including the invalidity defence, the non-infringement defence and the prior art defence

Yanling Zhou of Deqi provides an insight into the evaluation report system for patents, used in proceedings relating to utility models and designs