TapTechNews September 14th news, during the 2024 China Fair Competition Policy Publicity Week activities, the Supreme People's Court released 8 typical cases of anti-monopoly and anti-unfair competition on September 11th.
Among them, 4 typical anti-monopoly cases, involving important legal issues such as horizontal monopoly agreements of fixing commodity prices and jointly resisting transactions, and abusive market dominance behaviors such as tying sales, involving livelihood industries such as catering, digital TV, civil natural gas, and vegetable wholesale.
4 typical anti-unfair competition cases, involving the application of the general provisions of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law and the identification of counterfeiting confusion, false propaganda, and infringement of trade secrets, involving online and offline industrial fields such as platform data, traditional consumer goods, and new energy vehicles.
TapTechNews noticed that among these 8 cases, there is also a case of technical secret infringement of the "new energy vehicle chassis". Combined with the report in June this year, the plaintiff and the defendant are Geely and WM.
In 2018, Zhejiang Ji XX Holding Group Co., Ltd. and Zhejiang Ji XX Automobile Research Institute Co., Ltd. (collectively referred to as the Ji XX side) found that the two companies on the WM side used some resigned personnel as inventors or co-inventors and utilized the new energy vehicle chassis application technology and the technical information carried by 12 sets of chassis parts drawings and digital models contacted and mastered in the original unit to apply for 12 patents, and the WM EX series of electric vehicles launched by the WM side were suspected of infringing the involved technical secrets.
Considering that the WM side has obvious intention of infringement, bad circumstances of infringement, and serious consequences of infringement, the court applied a 2-fold punitive compensation to the infringing profit of the WM side from the first quarter of 2019 to the first quarter of 2022. The WM side should compensate the Ji XX side for economic losses and reasonable expenses of about 640 million yuan. To ensure the performance of non-monetary obligations, the second-instance judgment further clarified that if the WM side violates the non-monetary obligation of cessation of infringement determined by the judgment, it should pay a delay performance penalty of 1 million yuan per day; if the WM side disposes of the 12 patents without authorization, it should pay 1 million yuan at a time for each patent.
Horizontal monopoly agreement case of "rice noodle producer" [Supreme People's Court (2023) Supreme People's Court Knows the Final Civil Judgment No. 653] - Identification of fixed commodity prices and jointly resisted transactions and determination of damage compensation.
Abuse of market dominance case of "cable digital TV scrambling signal service public utility enterprise" [Supreme People's Court (2023) Supreme People's Court Knows the Final Civil Judgment No. 383] - Identification of tying and refusal to trade behaviors.
Bundled trading case of "natural gas company" [Supreme People's Court (2023) Supreme People's Court Knows the Final Civil Judgment No. 1547] - Burden of proof and determination of damage compensation in the follow-up lawsuit of anti-monopoly administrative penalty.
Abuse of market dominance case of "vegetable wholesale market" [Supreme People's Court (2024) Supreme People's Court Knows the Final Civil Judgment No. 748] - Arbitration agreement cannot exclude the People's Court from accepting monopoly civil disputes.
Technical secret infringement case of "new energy vehicle chassis" [Supreme People's Court (2023) Supreme People's Court Knows the Final Civil Judgment No. 1590] - Judgment of technical secret i nfringement and specific measures for cessation of infringement.
"Qingdou" unfair competition case [People's Court of Yuhang District, Hangzhou City, Zhejiang Province (2022) Zhejiang 0110 Minchu No. 8714] - Identification of false propaganda behavior of organizing brushing volume and creating false traffic.
"Schneider" counterfeiting confusion case [Jiangsu Provincial High People's Court (2021) Suzhi Final Civil Judgment No. 19] - Determination of the compensation amount for malicious infringement behavior with huge infringing profit.
Unfair competition case of enterprise credit information data platform [Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court, Guangdong Province (2023) Guangdong 03 Minzhong No. 4897] - Identification of unfair competition behavior of data users.