China’s Supreme People’s Court Revokes Preliminary Injunction

The case is the Supreme People’s Court Judgment of 3 July 2024—(2024) Zui Gao Zho Min Fu No. 1, reported in GRUR Int. 74(4), 2025, pp. 356-60, and translated by Xiao Wang.  The court of first instance had granted an act preservation measure (China’s analogue to a preliminary injunction) in favor of the plaintiff patent owner, ordering the defendant to cease manufacturing and selling two models of self-cleaning sweeping and mopping robot.  In revoking the decision, the SPC relies on article 104(1) of the Civil Procedure Law, and on certain articles from the Provisions of the Supreme People's Court on Several Issues Concerning the Application of Law in Cases Involving the Examination of Act Preservation in Intellectual Property Right Disputes (Jan. 1, 2019) [hereinafter Provisions].  I don’t know of an official translation into English of the current version of the Civil Procedure Law, but you can use a machine translator or refer to the GRUR Int. article, which provides two translations of article 104(1).  All of these reference the need for “an emergency” or “urgent circumstances.”  The GRUR Int. article also provides translations of the relevant articles from the Provisions, or you can consult this unofficial translation that is available online.  In any event, the SPC says that a court should first consider urgency, and in this regard it references article 6 of the Provisions, which provides as examples of urgency the imminent disclosure of a trade secret; the imminent infringement of the applicant’s personal or privacy rights; the imminent illegal disposition of IP rights; the infringement or expected infringement of IP rights at a time-sensitive place such as a trade fair; “a time-sensitive popular program is being or will be infringed” (I’m not sure what that means, but I would guess it is referring to the infringement of rights in a broadcast or live event?); or other circumstances exist requiring immediate measures.  Here, the SPC says there was no urgency.  None of the specific examples cited above were present, and the patentee waited 10 months after becoming aware of the alleged infringement to file its application.  The court also considers articles 7, 8, and 10 of the Provisions, which set forth, respectively, the general factors to be considered in deciding whether to grant the application ((1) whether the applicant's request has a factual basis and a legal basis, including whether the claimed intellectual property right is stable; (2) whether not taking act preservation measures will cause irreparable damage to the applicant's lawful rights and interests or cause the judgment of the case to be difficult to enforce; (3) whether the damage caused to the applicant by not taking act preservation measures exceeds the damage caused to the respondent by taking the act preservation measures; (4) whether taking act preservation measures harms the public interest; (5) other factors that should be considered”); the factors to be used in determining whether the IP rights are “stable” (e.g., have they undergone substantive examination, are they involved in or likely to be invalidated, etc.); and  the factors to be used in assessing whether the owner faces “irreparable damage.”  Here, the court notes that the patent in suit is an invention patent (not a design patent or utility model), so it has undergone substantive examination, but that courts nevertheless should be cautious in cases requiring a “very complex technical comparison.”  Moreover, although the applicant submitted an infringement analysis, the court characterizes it as not “a specific and in-depth analysis of the disputed technical features in conjunction with the specification,” so that “its conclusion is difficult to judge”; and there is (or at least was, during the relevant time period) an invalidation proceeding pending.  In addition, the SPC believes that the relevant damage here could be compensated by money.  Thus, the evidence was insufficient to show that the harm to the patentee from not granting the measure would exceed the harm to the defendant of granting it.  Finally, there are alternative products on the market and the public interest is not really at issue.  Overall, however, it was error to grant the injunction.