City Bank is Defeated in a Public Interest Patent Action

On 18 May 2009, the Patent Reexamination Council of State Intellectual Property Office of China issued the Decision of Declaring Invalidation of the Patent Right (Decision No. 13362), which declared invalidation of all 28 Claims of Rights in China patent CN 1097799C. The patentee was City Bank.

The complaint of invalidation was raised by Professor Chu ZHANG (Chair of Center for IP Research at China U. of Politics & Law, QIP) and Mr Yibiao ZHANG (research fellow at QIP) on 18 Dec. 2008.  The oral procedure was held on 20 April 2009.

This declaration of invalidation breaks through a huge barrier in the market of finance and stock transaction service set by the transnational corporations. Chinese enterprises now can enter into the relevant market and compete with financial giants in a fairer enviroment.

As a non-profit organization, the QIP will continue to hunt the questionable patents owned by the transnational corporations in China, and initiate more actiones publicae populares.

 

(Translated from Newiplaw.com
http://www.newiplaw.com/html/2009-06/2588.htm)

Rule of Moral or Rule of Law?

Rule of Moral or Rule of Law? Contending Passions of China's Information Control in the New Round of Metropolis Development

DONG Hao

This is an outline of my presentation prepared for a Symposium.

Lust, Caution is a movie telling a story in Shanghai and Hong Kong in 1940s. I personally like it because it has not only good scenery but also some artistic, as well as sexy episodes. From the law perspective, the interesting thing is: This movie, especially those episodes with nude bodies may not be protected by China's copyright law because Article 1 of that Law said that it aims to promote the development of 'spiritual civilization' but not indecent content, and Article 4 of the Law excludes the copyright protection to 'illegal works'.

Therefore, if someone uploaded the movie to a website in China, the copyright holder might not eligible to sue the uploader for the copyright infringement. On the other hand, if the copyright holder licensed a website to provide the online watching, both the holder and the website might confront with criminal penalty no matter what warning signal had they placed on the website before the visitor could see the movie. The worse thing is no instruction in China's law revealing what is obscene or indecent.

The history of China's endeavour on controlling the information can be described as a contending between rule of law and rule of moral. Until currently, the controlling is mainly based on the judgement of the officer's moral feelings (this includes the traditional moral or the so called Socialist Spiritual Civilization). Why? Because the law is very vague and uncertain.

The more complicated thing is: Some local government tends to carry out the Rule of Moral in name of Rule of Law. In Hangzhou, a new regulation has just promulgated, it says basically anyone who wants to post a thread onto BBS or any public discussion system must register her real name and citizen ID card number to the ISP beforehand.

Why do they believe this controlling will be useful? Not only because they don't understand the technology (if one want, he may break any firewall), but also because of the Chinese legal tradition. Traditional Chinese social controlers used to embedding, or implanting literary or even passionate wordings into the legislation or policy. For example, many officers use 'Internet violence' to support their suggestion to the above real name system. However, the Internet Violence is just a metaphor. There is no possibility to conduct a legal prohibited real 'violence' through the Internet. The only things that may happen are defamation, invasion of privacy or leaking the state secrets, which are far away from the 'violence' in the legal sense, such as battery, trespass or body harassment.

As Aristotle had said, 'the law is free from passions'. Good information governance should be under rule of law. The rule of moral might be efficient in some circumstances, but may also lead to many arbitrary administrations.  For example, there is a 2007 case in Shanghai on the blocking of the website. The plaintiff made a website hosting at a US web server. The website was purely lawful under Chinese law. However because the whole server was blocked afterwards, his website cannot be accessed from China. (Brief the case)

Contrasting to the mainland, the passions or pure moral doctrines are scarcely written in Hong Kong's legislations directly. Comparing with Mainland, Hong Kong has a more precise and value-neutral law on the information controlling. In the Edison Chan's obscene photo case, Hong Kong government firstly tried to determine, in accordance the fixed procedure, whether the photos were consistent with the definition of 'obscene' or 'indecency' regulated in Obscene and Indecent Articles ordinance (Ch. 390 of HK ordinance). The moral criticisms to the author or the uploader of those photos always stayed in the media, and are not concerned by the judges.
The bright aspect on mainland China is: now the controlling is gradually stepping into the pace of rule of law. A good result of recent campaign of attacking indecent content in China is that a semi-governmental organization published 13 standards for distinguishing the indecencies from other contents. It has its defects because the most important thing: procedure of determination is still lacking. However, it is a good start (while the future may still a contending of rule of moral and rule of law).

Between the mainland and Hong Kong, the most essential distinctions are not the buildings, human resources and industries, but the distinction between rule of moral and rule of law. Either of them has advantages for specific cases, while I think as for a general environment, stressing the rule of law would be crucial  for China's new round of development in metropolis. If Shanghai wish to be a financial centre or regain its glorious status that we can see in the movie Lust Caution, it has to be a safe harbour for everyone with clear and stable rule of law.

Judicial Mediation - A Deprofessionalization?

ON 15 AND 16 APRIL 2009, CityU of HK Law School held an international conference on the mediation. Experts from China, Hong Kong, Australia and Macau presented their latest academic outputs in the meeting.

The interesting thing is: Most Chinese experts are focusing on the judicial mediation, which is the mediation coordinated, and in many circumstances initiated, by judges during the litigations. Experts in other jurisdictions, by contrary, tends to discuss the mediation out of the court.

China's judiciary system is actually now experiencing a new wave of transformation. Contrary to the trend before 2007, the current path of the "judicial reform" is to make the judiciary more "close to people". One of the core measures is to enhance the "judicial mediation". In my view, if the "profesionalization is a world trend for the mediation" (stated by Professor Nadja Alexander, a prominent expert in the arena of mediation), then the emphasizing of the "judicial mediation" in Chinese courts can be named a trend of de-professionalization for the judcial practice.

In a lunch seminar a week later from the conference, Mr. WU Zhi, an Asso. professor from Hunan Normal University brought his interesating talk about the "the mediation in Chinese IP litigations" in CityU. His presentation proved again my assumption. In resent three years, Chinese judiciary system has issued a good many of documents on the policies of the mediation. Now the Supreme People's Courts seems stressed the mediation as the preference in the dispute resolution.

The most interesting thing in prof. Wu's seminar is the discussion among auditors. Most of auditors are the students who registered in CityU's creative LLM program for mainland judges. Because they are judges on the mainland China, they have many experiences in those judcial mediation. This makes the discussion being exciting. As a real auditor, I do obtain many useful knowledges and inpirations.

VS ?

One of the most impressive inspiration is: why the Chinese courts eager to be mediation centers? Two judges answered this question respectively (one was in the seminar and the other was on his way back to the dorm together with me, and their answers are amazingly identical!): because the China's courts are aiming at providing dispute solutions rather than the justice. This reminds me a precedent post in this blog on the "mission of the Supreme People's Courts" (in Chinese). Yes, the Chinese courts are not set as a seperation of sovereignty powers but the institution for dispute resolution authorized by the people's congress (at least in the Constitution literarily). The Constitution and Laws are just one of the "three supremacies" (the slogan of the supreme court - and a question in 2008 China Bar exam).

As a layman either in the mediation or in the procedure law. I cannot figure out whether this "deprofessionalization" is good or bad in an acedemic way. The only thing raised in my mind is: the conflict among dispute resolution mechanisms. Mediation is a more efficient way in resolving the disputes than litigation, while the feature of the litigation is it's formal procedure which may be costly but guarantted the rule of law. When the judicary simplified its procedure and compete to the unformal (or less-formal) mechanism of dispute resolution, it actually retreated itself from the position of "transporting justice". And its status will be conflict to the existing mediation institutions. How many cost will be paid in this institutional competition?

Another interesting topic in is: whether the IP litigation can really be deprofessionlized in the judicial mediation - even if we narrow the aim of the courts only at efficient dispute resolution? Let's leave this question in the next thread.