Supreme People's Court of China Issues Provisions on Application of Law in Adjudication of Injunction Cases Involving IP Disputes
On 13 December 2018, the Supreme People's Court of China (SPC) issued the Provisions on Several Issues Concerning the Application of Law in Adjudication of Cases Involving Injunction in Disputes over Intellectual Property Rights, which will take effect on 1 January 2019.
The Provisions, comprising 21 articles, include procedural rules to define, among other things, who may file an injunction and which courts have the jurisdiction to hear injunction cases; substantive rules including factors to consider in deciding whether to grant an injunction and effective period of an injunction; erroneous grant of an injunction and courts with the jurisdiction to hear lawsuits arisen from error in the grant of an injunction; and handling of simultaneous applications for multiple types of preservation.
In China, injunction was introduced into the Civil Procedure Law upon the revision thereof in 2012. Before that, injunction in the country was mainly limited to maritime cases and the court's pre-litigation order to stop IP infringement. Since its inclusion in the Chinese civil law, injunction has been seen to extend to cases involving online unfair competition, right to network dissemination of information, and disputes over IP contracts or ownership rights.
