New technologies and emerging business models are accelerating, raising the question of how intellectual property justice should respond to innovation demands. Yesterday, the Shanghai Pudong New Area People's Court held the third in a series of press conferences on serving and safeguarding the high-quality development of the leading zone, focusing on intellectual property adjudication.
According to the white paper, from July 2021 to June 2026, the Pudong Court accepted a total of 35,688 IP cases and concluded 36,829, including 35,175 civil cases, 506 criminal cases, and 7 administrative cases. Among civil cases, copyright, trademark, and unfair competition disputes accounted for 82.8%, 6.6%, and 6.3% respectively; in criminal cases, trademark-related crimes comprised 89.5%.
Copyright-protected subject matter has expanded to include micro-dramas, online games, and sports event programs. New types of disputes, such as APP-induced redirects, data scraping, and AI voice alteration, have entered the judicial arena. Technical disputes now cover source code, chip design, and cloud data. Over the past five years, the court has accepted 499 IP cases involving foreign parties or parties from Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan, with rights holders spanning 24 countries and regions, and the highest individual claim reaching 500 million yuan.
Over the past five years, the Pudong Court has safeguarded new quality productive forces from five aspects: national strategy, strict protection, efficient protection, collaborative protection, and rule-setting. It has innovated the "model judgment + class mediation" approach, reducing the average processing time for IP civil cases to 106 days.
Where to begin exploring the report's findings: The press conference announced 20 typical cases covering copyright, trademark rights, unfair competition, and trade secrets. These include both "national firsts" and "Shanghai firsts," as well as cases applying punitive damages, behavioral preservation orders, and evidence disclosure orders.
In Shanghai's first unfair competition case involving AI voice imitation, the defendant operated an AI voice-changing software that bulk-replicated the voices of well-known game characters without permission and sold resource packs. The court determined that these voices constituted commercial identifiers with certain influence, and the defendant's actions caused source confusion, constituting unfair competition. This case clarified the compliance boundaries for AI secondary creation, protecting the competitive interests of game character voices while preserving space for AI voice technology innovation.
Mao Mingjun, a deputy to the Pudong New Area People's Congress, noted that measures such as punitive damages, behavioral preservation, and trade secret protection precisely respond to the concerns of innovation entities, ensuring that "genuine innovation" receives "genuine protection." He expressed anticipation that the Pudong Court will continue to provide more replicable and scalable judicial experience.