China’s Supreme People's Procuratorate (SPP) on December 15 released this year’s second list of 6 representative cases for corporate compliance, two of which are intellectual property cases.

In the first IP case, a Shanghai-based electrical appliance producer in August 2018 was contracted by another Shanghai-based company to produce smart trash cans. Due to the quality of the sample produced by the producer as the defendant failed to meet the standard of the client as the plaintiff, the two parties terminated the contract in December 2018. To recover the initial investment loss, from December 2018 to November 2019, the defendant produced smart trash cans marketed and sold with the use of the plaintiff’s registered trademark without its authorization and gained a profit amounting to more than 5.6 million yuan ($880,000).

The Pudong New Area People’s Procuratorate of Shanghai city investigated and prosecuted the defendant for counterfeiting the registered trademark.

In the second IP case, when the Zhangjiagang Administration for Market Regulation of Hebei province on November 22, 2018, found a company selling ball bearings with a trademark counterfeiting the trademark owned by Swedish Ball Bearing Factory AB SKF, and seized 27,829 ball bearings with the counterfeit trademark in its stores and warehouses, which were valued at more than 680,000 yuan ($110,000). The Administration on December 17, 2018 transferred the case to the Zhangjiagang Public Security Bureau.

On February 14, 2019, SKF’s Chinese subsidiary company delivered an report identifying that the seized ball bearing products with the "SKF" trademark infringed its trademark rights. The Zhangjiagang Public Security Bureau began to investigate the case on February 15, 2019.

The full text is available here.