Research On Applying Civil Sanction Acts To The Intellectual Property Infringement

In cases of intellectual property infringement,the people's court may impose civil sanctions on the tortfeasor in accordance with laws and regulations and the specific circumstances of the case.Different from civil liability,civil sanction is closer to administrative penalty in essence.At present,there are no clear and uniform provisions on the procedure and substantive elements of applying civil sanctions in our legislation,which leads to a dilemma when people's courts apply civil sanctions in judicial practice.The procedural problems in the application of civil sanctions for IP infringement in China include:there is no clear provision on the subject of initiation;the distinction between different existing sanctions applying different determination procedures is unclear and is not strictly enforced in practice;the existing procedures provide insufficient protection for the rights of the parties,especially the sanctioned persons.The substantive problems of applying civil sanctions to intellectual property infringement mainly include three aspects:limitation of application scope,unspecific rules of quantitative punishment and unclear consideration factors when applying.In view of the above-mentioned problems,this paper holds that the court should not be the only subject qualified to initiate civil sanctions;different specific sanctions should be subject to uniform and standardized decision procedures;in terms of the scope of application of civil sanctions,civil sanctions applicable to IP infringement should cover all fields of IP protection;according to the different nature of the sanctions,the penalty standards and limits of the civil sanctions can be classified.In terms of the factors to be considered in the application of civil sanctions,civil sanctions should be based on the existence of civil liability,and the tortfeasor should have subjective intention.The tortfeasor must be a serious infringement,damaging the public interest.In addition,when applying civil sanctions,attention should be paid to the balance between the damaged interest and the gained interest.