On October 14, 2026, China’s Supreme People’s Court (SPC) released five Typical Cases of Plant Variety Protection by People’s Courts, timed to coincide with National Food Security Publicity Week (2026年全国粮食安全宣传周人民法院植物新品种保护典型案例). Typical cases are not binding precedent, but are curated and published by the SPC to illustrate how it wants a given area of law approached, signaling substantive and procedural standards to lower courts, litigants, and the public.
Category: Case
Shanghai First Intermediate People’s Court Holds AI Voice-Cloning Platform Liable, Shifts Burden of Proof on Training Data
On September 29, 2026, the Shanghai First Intermediate People’s Court issued a final ruling addressing what is described as Shanghai’s first case concerning natural-person voice-rights protection arising from AI-synthesized speech. The case centers on the intersection of generative AI training practices and personality rights, and its principal contribution is an evidentiary framework for proving infringement when a plaintiff has no visibility into how a generative model was trained. Note though that this case has not been marked as typical or …
Wuhan Court Considers AI Token Costs in Calculating Damages for Copyright Infringement of AI-Generated Work
October 14, 2026 Update: The text of the decision is available here. On September 23, 2026, the Jiang’an District People’s Court in Wuhan, China announced the first case in Hubei Province involving copyright infringement of an AI-assisted short drama, holding that AI-generated content meeting the requirements of a “work” is copyrightable, consistent with holdings from several other lower Chinese courts (see, e.g., Li v. Liu). In determining damages, the court included the computing costs associated with token consumption, along with …
China’s Supreme People’s Court Clarifies Profit-Based Test for Inventor Remuneration in Service Invention Dispute Over Adalimumab Biosimilar Patent
The Intellectual Property Tribunal of the Supreme People’s Court issued a final judgment on June 24, 2026, in case (2024)最高法知民终907号 published September 4, 2026, resolving an appeal from a Guangzhou Intellectual Property Court decision in a dispute over statutory inventor remuneration for a service invention. The court held that a company owes its inventor a share of the operating profit generated by a patented invention whenever the invention is commercially implemented and the relevant product generates profit in a given …