Zhou Qiang, president of the Supreme People's Court, urged stronger judicial protection of intellectual property rights to stimulate innovation throughout society.

He made the remarks at a special meeting of the leading Party members' group of the SPC held on Dec 7, where he also said that stronger judicial services should be provided for implementing new development concepts, building of the new development paradigm and promoting high-quality development.

Zhou said that courts should be deeply aware of the significance of IPR protection and fully enhance the senses of responsibility and mission from the perspective of national strategy and the requirements of entering a new stage of development.

Courts should give prominence to Chinese culture, put people's interests in the first place and protect IPR in just and reasonable ways, Zhou said. They should balance the relationship between public interests and innovation stimulation, while making the IPR-related trials play the important role in inspiring innovation and creation, safeguarding fair competition and protecting cultural achievements. He stressed to cultivate a good rule of law environment for implementing the innovation-driven development strategy and increasing the nation’s strength in technology and science.

By centering on the overall IPR protection pattern, an IPR work plan of the people's courts during the 14th Five-Year Plan(2021-25) should be mapped out, Zhou said, urging to further improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of IPR trials through strengthening civil judicial protection, intensifying criminal prosecution and supervising and supporting administrative law enforcement.

Zhou stressed to strengthen judicial protection of core technologies, key fields and emerging industries, while accelerating the implementation of a punitive compensation system, achieveing highly-efficiency allocation of innovation factors so as to promote businesses to improve their technological and scientific innovation capacity and mechanism.

Zhou required courts to strictly maintain judicial fairness, provide equal protection to Chinese and foreign parties' legitimate rights and interests and keep improving the international influence and credibility of China’s IPR judicial protection. He called on courts to actively participate in global IPR governance under the framework of the world’s IPR organizations and promote the global IPR governance system developing into more impartial and reasonable.

Zhou asked for accelerating the modernization of the IPR trial system and capability. He required courts to adhere to problem- and demand-oriented, and to keep deepening reform and, innovation in the IPR trials.

Experience should be summarized to further strengthen the construction of IP courts and tribunals. He encouraged the courts to actively explore trial rules and judgment methods that conform to the laws of IPR-related cases, especially those involving technologies. Meanwhile, supervision and guidance should be strengthened and judgment criteria should be unified so as to improve trials in this field.

Smart court construction should be further strengthened, as well as the sharing of judicial big data and such data's in-depth application, according to Zhou.

He also underlined the cultivation of IPR trial team, requiring to innovate training model and mechanism in a bid to cultivate a group of competent IPR trial talents.