Study On The Application Of Punitive Damages For Intellectual Property Rights

The increasing number of IPR infringement cases has,to a certain extent,restricted the protection of IPR in China.How to protect the interests of intellectual property rights holders has become an important issue at present.In order to punish infringers for their infringement,China is also fully implementing and enforcing the punitive damages system for intellectual property rights.Since 2013,China has added punitive damages for trademark infringement to the Trademark Law for the first time,and has successively added punitive damages to the Patent Law,the Copyright Law and the Civil Code.At present,China is still faced with multiple difficulties such as unclear conditions of application,abuse of statutory compensation,difficulty in determining the base amount of compensation,and no rules for compensation coefficients when hearing punitive compensation cases related to intellectual property rights.The difficulty of proof for the right holder and the difficulty of precise quantification of its damages also lead to the victims’inability to obtain full compensation through litigation.All these have seriously affected the level of protection of intellectual property rights in China.The original legislative intent of punitive damages and statutory damages is different,and the attitude towards the use of statutory damages is "not to use them if you can";however,from the perspective of judicial practice,statutory damages have become the state of "using them if you can".Therefore,in order to improve the punitive damages system in the field of intellectual property in China,it is necessary to provide for the priority status of punitive damages,and it is necessary to regulate the discretionary standards of subjective and objective elements,and the statutory damages should not be taken as the base of punitive damages in the calculation mode of punitive damages.In addition,in addition to the actual amount of damages,infringement profits and royalties as the basis for calculating punitive damages,we can also try to explore the application of discretionary damages to obtain a more accurate amount of compensation,so as to make the intellectual property infringement damage compensation system more scientific.To this end,China should further adjust the content of the punitive damages system in the field of intellectual property rights,so as to make the application of the punitive damages system more uniform in the law.