Crackdown on fakers drives surge in IPR cases handled by city courts
Print Edition
THE number of intellectual property rights cases accepted by the city’s courts last year rose 15 percent from 2013 to 7,688, the Shanghai Higher People’s Court said yesterday.
The number of civil cases handled in the period increased 28 percent to 6,064 of which 463 related to firms from Hong Kong, Taiwan and overseas, it said.
In the criminal and administrative cases, 19 of the 562 people tried were given prison terms of between three and seven years.
Meanwhile, Shanghai Customs officials told a press conference yesterday that more than 10,000 pairs of fake Nike sports shoes were confiscated earlier in the year in the city’s free trade zone.
An equivalent number of genuine shoes would be worth more than 5 million yuan (US$807,000), they said.
The case was the zone’s first involving an intellectual property infringement, and was successfully resolved due to cooperation between Shanghai Customs and its European counterparts, officials said.
The shoes were initially shipped by a local company from Shanghai to Hamburg, Germany. The firm did not declare the goods to Hamburg Customs for clearance, but instead shipped them back to Shanghai.
The turnaround aroused suspicion in Hamburg, and officials there alerted Shanghai Customs to the incident.
When the goods arrived back in the city on January 21, local customs officials monitored them. In March they moved in, and following an inspection, found the goods to be fake.
The case is now being investigated by police.
Shanghai Customs last year handled 461 IPR cases involving 35.75 million items, a near-fivefold increase from 2013.
Zheng Jugang, vice director and spokesman of Shanghai Customs said the huge increase was due to the fact that in the past, officials had been unconcerned about the flagrant abuse of intellectual property rights.
“Frankly speaking, we didn’t stress intellectual property protection that much in the past,” he said
At a related press conference, Shanghai police said on Tuesday that nine people suspected of being involved in the production and sale of fake condoms were detained last year.
The gang is accused of selling 12 million yuan worth of prophylactics packaged to look like famous name brands such as Durex and Jissbon.
Samples tested by the city’s food and drug administration were found to contain unsafe levels of heavy metals.
The fake goods were allegedly produced at a factory in Central China’s Henan Province and sold online.
The alleged ringleader of the gang, a woman surnamed Li, was detained last July.
A man surnamed Jia, who is accused of running the factory in Henan, was detained the following September.
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