The General Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China ("CPCCC") and the General Office of the State Council recently issued the Opinions on Strengthening Intellectual Property Protection (the "Opinions").

The Opinions set out the overall requirement of effectively curbing the trend of frequent infringement and significantly alleviating the situation where intellectual property right (IPR) holders are confronted with "difficulties in burden of proof, lengthy process, high costs and low compensation" while seeking to defend their rights, by the year 2022. To this end, the Opinions put forward 23 opinions, including giving harsher punishment against infringement and counterfeiting, strictly standardizing the evidence standards and rolling out stronger measures to guarantee enforcement, from six perspectives, including rolling out policies toward rigorous intellectual property protection. Among others, the Opinions call for efforts to accelerate revising and refining the Patent Law, the Trademark Law and the Copyright Law, etc.; make improvement to the legislation regarding protection of geographical indications; introduce the system of punitive damages in the patent and copyright fields as soon as possible; dramatically heighten the upper limit of the statutory compensation standard on infringement and require higher compensation for the damage inflicted; regulate and restrain malicious trademark registration, abnormal patent applications, lawsuits filed for evil purposes, among other behavior; and explore ways to strengthen the effective protection of trade secrets, classified business information as well as its source codes, etc.

(Source: www.gov.cn)