darts-776-356-F-zh<\/a>)<\/p>\nSMC submitted a new evidence during the process of the Supreme People\u2019s Court\u2019s retrial to prove: 1)Ni admitted that the aim of offering his personal account for collecting payments was to escape tax, 2) Ni, one of the two shareholders of the company, had an in-law relationship with the other shareholder, and the company was actually controlled and managed by Ni. The court found a new fact based on the original evidences: in the official online store of Zhongqi Company on Alibaba, there was information with the title of \u201cWholesale of SMC Solenoid Valve(SY5120-5LZD-01)\u201d, \u201cDetails of SMC Solenoid Valve\u201d, \u201cHow The Solenoid Valve Works \u201d,etc. in a section of \u201cNews Center\u201d . The article of \u201cDetails of SMC Solenoid Valve\u201d introduced the solenoid valve\u2019s operating principle, application, structure, and selection principle and method in great detail. The accused infringing product purchased by SMC was clearly and definitely marked by the figurative trademark of \u201cSMC\u201d.<\/p>\n
For the issue of whether Ni and Zhongqi Company constituted joint infringement and therefore should bear joint liability, the court held that: First, Ni and Zhongqi Company had a common will. Ni was the legal representative, controlling shareholder, executive director and manager of the company. The only other shareholder of the company had an in-law relationship with him. He had strong control over the company, and the will of him and the company had obvious commonality. Second, Ni and the company should be aware of that they may infringe SMC\u2019s patent right. The company clearly mentioned on its online store that they wholesaled SMC solenoid valve, and introduced SMC Solenoid Valve\u2019s operating principle, application, structure, and selection principle and method in detail. Moreover, the accused infringing product was marked by the figurative trademark of \u201cSMC\u201d. As the legal representative of the company, Ni was obviously and clearly aware of the corresponding products and technical contents of SMC, and he had a clear cognition that the alleged infringing product might fall into the scope of the patent involved of SMC. In this situation, Ni and the company still carried out the acts of manufacturing, selling and offering to sell the alleged infringing products, which can be considered to having obvious joint infringement intention. Lastly, there existed a mutual use, cooperation, support for each other between Ni and the company. Ni’s act of collecting the payment through his personal bank account was recognized by the company. Both of them jointly completed the sales of the infringing product and the recovery of the payment. It can be seen that Ni used his control power over the company to implement the act of manufacturing, selling, and offering to sell the alleged infringing products jointly with the company. To sum up, the court agreed with SMC ‘s claim that Ni and Zhongqi Company constituted jointly infringement and should bear joint liability.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
C<\/b><\/strong>omment<\/b><\/strong><\/p>\nObjectively, Ni\u2019s act of collecting the payment through his personal bank account was proved by the original evidence. Both the\u00a0court of first instance and the appeals court considered that it failed to prove that Ni and the company had subjectively common intention of infringement. However, the Supreme People\u2019s Court combined the newly submitted evidence and two other important facts found in the original evidences\u00a0to conclude that Ni and the company had an obvious intention of joint infringement, and finally demonstrated that their joint infringement was established from both the subjective and objective aspects.<\/p>\n
From the perspective of the trial of the case, although there was new evidence at the retrial stage, the other facts found by the Supreme People’s Court based on the original evidences played a very important role to prove that Ni subjectively “should be clearly aware that the alleged product infringed the patent right\u201d. We cannot judge whether the court of first instance and the appeals court believed that \u201cthe other facts found by the Supreme People\u2019s Court based on the original evidences\u201d did not have a substantial effect on the determination of Ni \u2019s infringement or ignored these facts, but the case can at least give us the following implications:<\/p>\n
Enterprise executives cannot completely disassociate themselves from the responsibility for infringement of intellectual property rights. Under certain circumstances, “duty behaviors” for which enterprise executives consider to be reasonable would often become a necessary component of joint infringement, including: the situation that executives(or shareholders) have financial confusion with enterprises (this phenomenon is common in many small and medium-sized enterprises with irregular management), and the situation that a company\u2019s irregular corporate governance structure makes it difficult to distinguish the company’s will from the personal will of executives (or shareholders). Especially in severe cases , financial confusion may lead executives (or shareholders) to face external debt with the company to a greater extent .<\/p>\n
In addition, combining the conclusions of this\u00a0case and the statistics of the Supreme People\u2019s Court’s reversing rate in infringement cases in the Darts-ip\u2019s patent database (as shown in the figure below, the reversing rate and the rate for remanding for retrial of the Supreme People\u2019s Court together account for 23%), it can be predicted\u00a0that if the relevant evidence is sufficient and strong, insisting on an appeal should\u00a0be a good choice.\u00a0Especially as nowadays the Supreme People\u2019s Court has jurisdiction over all patent cases for appeals ,the\u00a0patentees who have concerns\u00a0about geographical protection will protect their rights more confidently.<\/p>\n
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Source: https:\/\/clarivate.com\/darts-ip\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Supreme People\u2019s Court of China reversed a judgement made by the court of second instance in a patent infringement case of SMC Corporation v. Ni Tiancai, Leqing Zhongqi Pneumatic…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":164,"featured_media":265718,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[486],"class_list":["post-6579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-darts-ip"],"acf":[],"lang":"en","translations":{"en":6579},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"pll_sync_post":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/clarivate.com\/intellectual-property\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/clarivate.com\/intellectual-property\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/clarivate.com\/intellectual-property\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clarivate.com\/intellectual-property\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/164"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clarivate.com\/intellectual-property\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6579"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/clarivate.com\/intellectual-property\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":265434,"href":"https:\/\/clarivate.com\/intellectual-property\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6579\/revisions\/265434"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clarivate.com\/intellectual-property\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/265718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/clarivate.com\/intellectual-property\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clarivate.com\/intellectual-property\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clarivate.com\/intellectual-property\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}