At the China Intellectual Property Annual Conference held on September 8, 2026, representatives from industry and the judiciary described how new technologies are creating new shocks and challenges for intellectual property, requiring dispute-resolution approaches — and even policies and laws — to keep pace with the times, Caixin reported. Kang Wei, head of the terminal and application technology IP department at Huawei Technologies, gave a vivid example: after a 'hit' pair of earphones priced around 1,000 yuan reached the market, counterfeits priced at just over 50 yuan quickly appeared, advertised with the slogan 'no need to spend a thousand — performance fully restored.' Investigation showed the infringers had not leaked design manuscripts at all; they could reproduce the drawings directly with 3D scanning, and had cut the time needed to produce counterfeits from six months to just one to three months. Huawei usually asks infringers to stop first, then proceeds through administrative adjudication or mediation, with only a minority of complex or serious cases going to litigation.

On the policy front, Song Beibei of the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) told the conference that the revised Regulations on the Protection of Layout-Designs of Integrated Circuits have completed amendment and will take effect on October 15, 2026. The revision improves the application and registration procedures and the rules on infringement damages, and brings layout-designs with integrated photonic and quantum functions within the scope of protection, so as to adapt to frontier technological development and provide institutional support for China's IC technology innovation and the application of its results.

CNIPA is also working to speed up patent examination and grant. Song said China has now established 83 national IP protection centers and 54 national IP rapid enforcement centers; so far this year, these centers have accepted nearly 200,000 patent applications for pre-examination, of which 126,000 were granted, with the grant cycle for invention patents compressed to within three months. Patents covering the Huajiang Canyon Bridge project, Unitree's humanoid robots, Xiaomi Auto's die-casting materials and Moore Threads' GPU technology were all granted quickly after pre-examination.

Local protection systems are also helping companies handle cross-border disputes. The Jiangsu and Wuxi IP protection centers have guided foreign-trade companies in responding to Section 337 investigations in the United States, reducing enforcement costs, while authorities in Zhejiang guided DeepSeek in dealing with bad-faith overseas trademark squatting in the United Kingdom, Japan and other countries, accelerating overseas applications and registrations through the Madrid system.

Original Link: https://www.caixin.com/2026-09-08/102482934.html