On January 12, the State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China (SCIO) held a press conference on the statistical data of intellectual property-related work in 2021. The number of high-value invention patents per 10,000 population reached 7.5, an increase of 1.2 over the previous year.

In 2021, the effective amount of invention patents of China was 3.597 million, wherein, the number of effective invention patents in China (excluding Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan) was 2.704 million. The number of high-value invention patents per 10,000 population reached 7.5, an increase of 1.2 over the previous year.

In terms of the data, the innovation ability and creativity of Chinese market entities have been continuously enhanced. By the end of 2021, there were 298,000 domestic enterprises with valid invention patents in China, an increase of 52,000 over the previous year. Domestic enterprises have 1.908 million valid invention patents, a year-on-year increase of 22.6%, 5.0 percentage points higher than average growth rate of the whole country, in which there are 1.213 million valid invention patents of high-tech enterprises, accounting for 63.6% of the total domestic enterprises.

At the same time, the reserves of patents in key core technology fields have been continuously enhanced, which has provided stronger support for industrial upgrading. The data shows that according to the statistics of 35 technical fields categorized by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), as of 2021, the three fields with the fastest growth in the effective quantity of domestic invention patents in China are information technology management methods, computer technology and medical technology, which have increased respectively. 100.3%, 32.7% and 28.7% year-on-year.

In addition, the scale of patent and trademark financing pledge has been further expanded, the inclusiveness has been further prominent, and the confidence of foreign companies in the intellectual property protection of China has been further enhanced.

In 2020, the value added in Chinese patent-intensive industries will exceed 12 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 5.8% (without excluding price factors), accounting for an increase of 0.35 percentage points in GDP compared with the previous year, and its contribution rate to GDP growth reached 24.6% with a strong stimulating effect on the economic growth.

Meanwhile, it has strong anti-risk capability and great development resilience. With the great impact on economic and social development caused by the new crown pneumonia epidemic in 2020, the added value of patent-intensive industries such as information and communication technology service industry, pharmaceutical and medical industry, R&D design and technical service industry respectively increased by 15.7%, 10.1% and 5.9% year-on-year, becoming a new energy of motion for economic growth.

It is expected that by 2025, the added value of my Chinese patent-intensive industries will account for 13% of GDP.

In recent years, the CNIPA has continued to carry out the patent quality improvement project, and has resolutely cracked down on abnormal patent applications not aimed at the protection of innovation, achieving good results.

These measures include: actively guiding local governments to optimize patent policies, completely canceling funding and incentives in the application process, and guiding high-quality development; intensifying front-end inspections, strictly investigating and prudently identifying cases suspected as abnormal patent applications by the means of combining computer-aided screening and manual inspections; notifying the local authorities in time to request the local intellectual property management department to conduct verification, and require the applicant to initiatively withdraw; increasing positive publicity and guidance to create a good environment with high-quality for development, guide applicants to apply for patents correctly, and actively promote quality improvement.

The Supreme People’s Court believed that the determination of patent protection scope should not only strictly protect the interests of the patentee, but also safeguard the publicity of the claims and the public’s trust in the patent documents, and balance the relationship between the patentee and the public.

To determine whether the patentee clearly understands and incorporates the specific technical solution into the protection scope of the patent right when applying for a patent, it can be affirmed in conjunction with the content of the description and drawings, and the description and drawings should be viewed as a whole. The judgment standard is the understanding of the technical person in the art after reading the claiIn 2021, the CNIPA specially organized a special campaign to crack down on abnormal patent applications, and a total of 815,000 abnormal patent applications were notified to all over parts of the country in four batches. By the end of 2021, the withdrawal rate of abnormal patent applications notified of the first three batches reached 97%. In the next step, the CNIPA will continue to work with local intellectual property management departments to improve the normalization of working mechanism for cracking down on abnormal patent applications, promote the formation of a joint effort of upper and lower linkage and collaborative governance, and intensify the crackdown on abnormal patent applications, contribute to improving the quality of patent applications and accelerate the construction of a great power of intellectual property.

   From People.cn

January 12th, 2022