Intellectual Property Rights On The System Of Punitive Damages

As culture industry has become the backbone of economic development, and as the strengthening of the protection of intellectual property rights has become more of an issue in the international arena, the Chinese government is forced to acknowledge that at the core of the growth of the culture industry lies intellectual property rights, and that the premise for the industry's continual growth is the protection of such rights. Hitherto, in cases concerning the violation of intellectual property rights, the Chinese court has settled the damages according to "the loss of the rightful person", "the illegal gain of the infringer", or "the adequate license royalty. " In most cases, however, due to lack of evidence the court uses the "Statutory damages" rule in estimating the damages. In vast occasions this "Statutory damages" fails to satisfy both parties of the suit and gives a serious negative effect on the impartiality and the neutrality of the legal proceedings. Thus, in order to facilitate the state's new strategy, to protect the benefits of the rightful owner of the intellectual property, and to enhance the competence in controlling various malicious infringements, I argue the necessity of introducing a "Punitive damages" in infringement areas such as trademarks, patents, copyrights and repression of unfair competition-n. The "Punitive damages" is the monetary compensation other than the actual loss from the pirate to the owner. Its purpose is to punish the infringer and to restrain further similar piracies.This paper first explains the present condition of the Chinese property rights violation by analyzing the number of infringement cases finalized through the legal proceedings and administrative penalties. Then it introduces the background and basic concepts of the Punitive damages and studies how it works in the United States, Germany, South Korea and China. Next follows the statistics and analysis of a total of 361 rulings regarding the intellectual property rights damage suits filed at the Court of Shanghai during 1996 and 2008. Also, any differences, if present, in the current situation in each field of intellectual property rights such as trademarks, patents, copyrights, and unfair competition are mentioned. Through the research of actual findings,I found the differences between the damages that the owner has claimed and the actual damages that were sentenced, searched the cost for a plaintiff to file a suit, studied the problems of the Statutory damages that is currently practiced often in the Chinese courts, and finally proposed the necessity of the Punitive damages and the way it should be introduced.