The "Blue Book on the Rule of Law (2017)" recently released by the Academy of Social Sciences disclosed that the overall quality of China's product supply is currently low and the degree of innovation is insufficient. China's intellectual property rights still have problems such as high quantity and low quality, insufficient protection and excessive protection costs, which seriously restrict corporate innovation and product quality improvement.
The Rule of Law Blue Book introduced a survey of 8,938 people under the title "Evaluation of China's Intellectual Property Protection Level". Overall, 67% of the respondents believed that China's intellectual property protection level needs to be gradually strengthened. Even 24.4% of the respondents thought that it needed to be greatly strengthened, while only 7.2% of the respondents thought it was appropriate. It is not difficult to see from the survey results that China’s intellectual property protection level needs to be further improved.
In fact, the choice a company makes—whether to commit to its own innovation or to imitate and plagiarize—depends to a large extent on the analysis of costs and benefits.
For a long time, the level of intellectual property protection in China has been too low, resulting in many companies being unwilling to innovate in the product supply process, and more willing to imitate and plagiarize. In damages litigation for patent infringement cases, the "statutory compensation" standard was applied to 97.25 cases, and the average compensation amount was only 79,600 yuan. In comparison, the average amount of patent litigation compensation in the United States from 2007 to 2012 was as high as 29.4 million yuan. In trademark infringement cases, the average amount of compensation awarded by the court is 62,000 yuan, which is also disproportionate to the huge efforts that trademark operators have spent on maintaining their brands over a long period of time. The low amount of compensation in intellectual property infringement cases has contributed to the formation of this situation: innovators need to spend a lot of money and effort to make a difference in the pursuit of product quality, while infringers only need to pay a low cost to "plagiarize" and use it. Therefore, there are heavy traces of imitation in the supply of various products in China, insufficient innovation capabilities, and the number of intellectual property disputes remains high.