Excerpts from the Report on Judicial Protection of Intellectual Property Rights of Shanghai Intellectual Property Court in 2021

In 2021, the Shanghai Intellectual Property Court accepted a total of 5,432 intellectual property cases, marking a year-on-year increase of 2.9%. Among them, there were 4,177 civil cases of first-instance, 1,186 civil cases of second-instance, 3 administrative cases of first-instance, 13 security pre-litigation cases, and 53 other cases.

Among all the accepted cases, the top five (in terms of number of acceptance) were 3,550 patent cases (accounting for 65.35%), 652 copyright cases (accounting for 12%, excluding computer software copyright cases) cases. There were 551 cases involving computer software copyright (10.14%), 355 trademark cases (6.54%), and 119 unfair competition cases (2.19%). In addition, there were 116 franchise contract cases and 29 technology contract cases.

Among the cases of first-instance accepted, there were 4,133 technical cases involving patents, computer software, and technical secrets, accounting for 98.95% of the total. Among them, there were 3,436 patent infringement cases, 91 patent ownership cases, 23 patent contract cases, 404 computer software contract cases, 147 computer software ownership and infringement cases, and 32 technical secret cases.

In 2021, Shanghai Intellectual Property Court concluded a total of 4,230 intellectual property cases, with an average trial period of 165.49 days.