China’s Trademark Office has announced the second phase of its integrated electronic evidence service platform for trademark review, opening a direct blockchain channel for case-related e-evidence. On paper, this looks like another system update. In practice, it reaches into one of the hardest parts of trademark review: how digital evidence enters the case file, how quickly it can be verified, and how convincingly it can be organized in two-party proceedings.Read together with China’s broader move toward full electronic trademark processing, the change matters more than the interface...
China’s Supreme People’s Court Intellectual Property Court released its administrative judgment in case (2022) Zui Gao Fa Zhi Xing Zhong No. 255 on 13 July 2026, dismissing the appeal against the validity of a patent covering an in-vitro diagnostic device and system held by EDAN Diagnostics. The dispute centred on whether the invention had been completed in China and therefore required a confidentiality examination before its first foreign filing. The court treated the place where the substantive technical solution was formed—not the applicant’s nationality, funding source or later...
CNIPA’s 2026 administrative protection work plan calls for closer coordination with commerce authorities and stricter management of outbound intellectual property transfers connected to technology exports. The measure does not create a wholly new approval track, but it points to more disciplined review of cross-border deals involving restricted technologies, core patents, software rights and other strategic know-how.For companies in biopharmaceuticals and advanced manufacturing, the practical risk extends beyond an outright patent sale. Exclusive licences, bundled technology packages and...
On 2 July 2026, the China National Intellectual Property Administration published detailed analyses of the ten representative patent reexamination and invalidation cases for 2025, expanding on the case summaries released in April. In the AI-related case concerning the generation of dynamic images from audio, the patent was upheld and the panel treated model design, model training and model application as distinct stages when applying the inventive-step test. The analysis indicates that examiners should look at the application scenario, data or object being processed, the training method and...
China’s trademark authority has announced that, from 1 July 2026, trademark matters handled through agencies should in principle be filed electronically through the CNIPA online service system rather than on paper. The change covers filing, examination and official communications, while matters involving electronic evidence must follow the relevant submission guidance.For agencies, this is more than a change of delivery channel. Account permissions, client authorisations, evidence formats, version control and deadline records will need tighter internal management. A fuller digital trail...
During the 68th Series of Meetings of the WIPO Assemblies, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) announced a five-year renewal of its Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) arrangement with the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA). The renewal preserves a work-sharing route under which eligible applicants may rely on favourable examination results from one office to request accelerated processing before the other. CIPO also signed new cooperation work plans with the European Union Intellectual Property Office, the Norwegian Industrial Property Office and France’s...
China’s National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) and the European Patent Office (EPO) announced on 6 July 2026 that a new bilateral Patent Prosecution Highway pilot will begin on 1 August. Applicants will be able to rely on qualifying examination work from one office to seek accelerated treatment of a corresponding application before the other. The new route will operate alongside the existing IP5 PPH framework, under aligned eligibility conditions, with no fixed end date.The bilateral channel gives applicants another practical option for coordinating parallel Chinese and...
China’s revised Trademark Law was formally adopted on 26 June 2026 and will take effect on 1 January 2027. The first wave of official explanations released in early July makes one point hard to miss: this is not a narrow procedural update. It is a broader reset of how trademark filing, use, administration and enforcement are expected to fit together.The headline issue is tougher action against bad-faith filings and stockpiling. That matters. But the more consequential shift is structural. The law is moving away from a system that could still tolerate “file first, sort it out later”...
On 14 July 2026, Shanghai Zhizhen Intelligent Network Technology, known for its Xiao-i Robot platform, announced that the Shanghai High People’s Court had rejected all of its claims in case (2020) Hu Zhi Min Chu No. 7. The court found that Apple’s Siri did not infringe Chinese invention patent ZL200410053749.9, covering a “chatbot system”. Zhizhen had sought an injunction and damages provisionally calculated at RMB 10 billion, making the dispute one of China’s most closely watched high-value patent cases involving artificial intelligence and consumer electronics.The ruling is a reminder...
China has opened public consultation on the second-review draft of its revised Trademark Law, and the policy message is not subtle: the lawmakers are still moving against abnormal filings, bad-faith registrations and trademark stockpiling detached from genuine business needs. For brand owners, the shift is bigger than a tougher slogan. The distance between filing strategy and real commercial use is getting harder to defend.That matters because the practical issue has never been limited to a handful of headline-grabbing squatting cases. The deeper problem is the accumulation of marks filed...
China’s revised Patent Examination Guidelines, effective from 1 January 2026, move legality review much closer to the centre of AI and big-data patent examination. CNIPA did two important things at once. It added an explicit Article 5(1) review standard for AI and big-data applications, and it also revised the examination baseline so that, where necessary, examiners may review the specification itself rather than looking only at the claims. That is a meaningful shift. Applications involving data collection, label management, rule setting or recommendation decisions are no longer judged only...
China’s National Intellectual Property Administration has released its 2026 legislative work plan, placing the revision of the Trademark Law, the revision of the Regulations on the Protection of Layout-Designs of Integrated Circuits, and amendments to the Measures for the Administration of Priority Patent Examination on the year’s formal agenda. For companies and practitioners, this is more than a list of drafting tasks. It is a policy map showing where the Chinese IP system is likely to tighten, clarify, and modernize next.What stands out is not only the individual projects, but the...
CNIPA has announced a new procedural move aimed at shortening review times for trademark opposition and invalidation matters, with a specific fast-track simplification now being piloted for a narrow category of bad-faith cases. Under the official notice, where a case appears to involve large-scale trademark squatting and the registrant fails to respond in the invalidation stage without justified cause, the matter may be shifted from panel review to a sole-examiner review track.The practical importance lies in more than speed. In many brand disputes, the real delay does not come from...
China’s CNIPA has issued a new work briefing on deeper action against bad-faith trade mark filings and paired it with a group of guiding cases on “rapid invalidation.” The practical signal is stronger than a routine policy reminder. For large-scale stockpiling, free-riding on established brands and opportunistic hot-topic filings, the system is not only promising stricter control in principle. It is accelerating case handling and tightening the evidentiary threshold in ways that can change how disputes are won or lost.The more consequential part may be what the briefing says about...
CNIPA this week issued the Annual Work Guide for the Demonstration Programme on Building China into an IP Powerhouse (2026). The policy signal is fairly direct: assessment should move further towards patent quality and industrialisation, rather than simple filing-count targets. The guide calls for patent quality and patent commercialisation to be emphasised in project reviews, institutional evaluation, enterprise recognition and talent assessment, while avoiding the use of patent numbers as a stand-alone benchmark. For local authorities, parks, universities and demonstration enterprises,...
China’s National Intellectual Property Administration, together with the Ministry of Public Security and the State Administration for Market Regulation, has rolled out an action plan to make 2026 a nationwide “Year of Rectification and Standardization” for the intellectual property agency industry. The plan goes beyond another short enforcement push: it targets bad-faith patent and trademark filings, unlicensed practice, certificate lending, falsified materials, improper client solicitation, and weak gatekeeping at the approval and recordal stages, while also tying in credit-based and...
On March 26, 2026, the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) announced that Commissioner Shen Changyu held bilateral talks with WIPO Director General Daren Tang on the latest developments in intellectual property and cooperation on Technology and Innovation Support Centers (TISCs). In the meeting, CNIPA said it is studying the formulation of the national 15th Five-Year Plan for the protection and utilization of intellectual property as the top-level design for the next five years, and that China will continue to participate actively in global IP governance under the...
The IP5 offices — CNIPA, the EPO, the JPO, the KIPO and the USPTO — have jointly decided to extend the IP5 Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) pilot for another three years, from January 6, 2026 to January 5, 2029. The offices also made clear that the requirements and procedures for filing PPH requests under the pilot will remain unchanged. In practical terms, applicants will still be able to rely on an existing and familiar work-sharing route to accelerate related patent applications across major jurisdictions at a time when examination efficiency, budget discipline and filing speed are...
China’s latest revision to the Patent Examination Guidelines, published by CNIPA at the end of 2025 and effective from January 1, 2026, makes the examination framework for inventions involving artificial intelligence, big data and algorithm-related features significantly more explicit. The revised text renames the relevant section to cover inventions involving AI, big data and other solutions containing algorithmic features or business rules and methods, while also adding a clearer Article 5(1) filter for content that violates law, social morality or the public interest.This is more than a...
From January 1, 2026, China’s revised Patent Examination Guidelines move same-day dual filing out of the realm of informal filing tactics and back into a tightly structured statutory exception. According to CNIPA’s official interpretation issued on December 4, 2025, where the same applicant files both an invention patent application and a utility model application for the same invention-creation on the same filing date, the applicant must make a same-day double-filing declaration at the filing stage for each application. If that declaration is missing, the invention application may still be...
