Patented technology goes out, and enterprises go out to sea to face patent encounters.

In recent months, domestic mobile phone manufacturers have successively advocated patent protection. According to Nanjing Huaxun, in May this year, Huawei filed an intellectual property lawsuit against Samsung in China and the United States. In the lawsuit, Huawei seeks compensation from Samsung for infringement of its intellectual property rights, including high-value patents involving communications technology and software used by Samsung's mobile phones. In early July, Huawei again filed a patent lawsuit in the United States, accusing US wireless operator T-Mobile of refusing to reach a patent license agreement with it and continuing to infringe on its own patent rights.

The field of communications is known as the "patent jungle", and tens of thousands of technology patents can be highly integrated on a small mobile phone. In the past, because the core patents are often in the hands of several foreign technology giants, domestic mobile phone manufacturers have long been plagued by patent protection from overseas manufacturers, and have frequently encountered obstacles in the development process of "going out to sea.

Huawei's overseas counterattack, to a certain extent, reflects the new changes in the development of domestic science and technology enterprises. The layout of patents has become the choice of many scientific and technological innovation enterprises to break through the "Red Sea.

Patent protection has become an important business strategy in global competition.

At the European Cup, many fans found that the logo of Chinese enterprise "Hisense" appeared prominently in the billboards on the sidelines of the major stadiums in France, where it was held. Such scenes have gradually increased in recent years, and they have become a microcosm of Chinese technology companies "opening up territory" overseas.

In the past 40 years of reform and opening up, the development of China's manufacturing industry has experienced several stages of development. At first, foreign companies entered the Chinese market on a large scale by virtue of their advantages in capital and technology, but soon Chinese manufacturing companies "recovered lost ground" in imitation and catching up. In recent years, they have shown a trend of "going out to sea" on a large scale.

Nanjing Huaxun believes that the "going out" of patented technology is also an important part of the "going out to sea" of the manufacturing industry. Some scholars have analyzed and pointed out that there are two major aspects of the institutional background for Chinese technology companies to "go global". One is the continuous improvement of China's patent system and the integration of the international patent system, and the other is that China has been accompanied by "going out" since the reform and opening up. The promotion of the "global" strategy has gradually integrated into the global economy, thus starting an international road in multiple dimensions including technology.

However, Dr. Zhao Liang, director of the China Communications Standardization Association, said that Chinese technology companies need to cross many thresholds to "go global", otherwise some problems may become hidden "bombs".

A few years ago, a domestic mobile phone was deeply involved in patent disputes when it expanded the Indian market. At home, the company quickly became popular in a short period of time. At the end of 2014, Ericsson filed a lawsuit in India on the grounds that the company infringed its basic patents, asking the Indian court to ban the sale of the company's mobile phones and ask it to compensate for related losses.

Because of the regional nature of intellectual property rights, even technologies that do not have patent rights in China may have patent rights abroad. Many patent litigation is actually a "big stick" of intellectual property rights that multinational companies dance after feeling the competitive pressure from Chinese companies. Patent litigation has become a consideration of multinational companies due to its high litigation costs and sky-high compensation. Important business strategy.

Patent legal risks are often a matter of business life and death.

Patents in the field of mobile communication have developed to the point where it is almost impossible to avoid them. When technology patents have become so dense that it is impossible to develop through a completely different technology path, technology companies must face up to the legal risks they may encounter in patents.

Many aspects of enterprise production and operation and market competition will produce patent risk, in product research and development, patent application, production and processing, marketing and other aspects of the uncertainty caused by patents, thus affecting the business objectives of enterprises.

Nanjing Huaxun experts analyzed that once they lose in a patent dispute, the first thing they encounter is the problem of stopping the use of patents, which at least means that related products must not be produced again, which is often related to the life and death of an enterprise. Even in the process of patent litigation, the court may issue an injunction first, which makes the enterprises involved suffer heavy losses.

In addition to being asked to stop infringement, the main legal risk encountered by Chinese technology companies when competing with foreign companies in domestic and overseas markets comes from huge compensation.

In countries and regions such as the United States that have a developed patent protection system and gather a large number of technology companies, there is often a phenomenon that technology companies "disappear" in the long patent litigation. Some of these companies simply offered to let the other party buy themselves out because they could not afford the high compensation after losing the patent lawsuit, while others, even if they won the lawsuit, could go bankrupt due to years of legal fees.

In China, with the implementation of the national intellectual property strategy, the people's courts have continuously strengthened the judicial reform of intellectual property rights, and the protection of intellectual property rights has been strengthened. In 2015, Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou intellectual property courts began to operate. The establishment of special intellectual property courts further demonstrated my country's determination to increase the judicial protection of intellectual property rights. "If there was a fluke mentality in the previous years, then such cases are often affected. Today, with global attention, we must change our own concepts." Nanjing Huaxun said.

No patent "shell", no bargaining chips

In the face of the risks faced at any time in the global competition, how can we break through the constraints?

The key is that the enterprise reserves enough patent "shells '. There is both competition and cooperation among technology companies. For example, in the communications industry, when two companies enter into a patent license, the party with the largest number of patent licenses usually charges the party with the smaller number of royalties. Since almost all companies cannot bypass the patents held by other companies in the process of product development, a better competitive strategy is to have the leverage to sit down and negotiate by achieving a parity of patent ownership between them.

Take Huawei, which has frequently attacked overseas, as an example. According to relevant data released by Huawei, Huawei's R & D investment in 2015 reached 9.2 billion US dollars, accounting for more than 15% of total sales, exceeding Apple's 8.5 billion US dollars. Huawei's total R & D investment in the past 10 years has exceeded US $37 billion. As of December 31, 2015, Huawei has obtained a total of 50377 patent authorizations, 52550 Chinese patents and 30613 foreign patents. Among them, more than 90% of the patents are invention patents.

Under the current international intellectual property system, although the technology "going out" of transnational patent applications is facing the system cost of the patent system, with the improvement of Chinese enterprises' innovation ability and the change of intellectual property concept, the technology "going out" of Chinese enterprises is becoming a phenomenon of China's rapid economic development.

On June 7 this year, the Intellectual Property Development Research Center of the State Intellectual Property Office released the 2015 China Intellectual Property Development Report. The "Report" shows that my country's intellectual property development level has ranked in the middle and upper reaches of the world, and the gap between overall strength and world-class has further narrowed. But at the same time, at present, China's overseas patent applications are mainly distributed in the communications and electronics industries, and the industries are relatively concentrated, reflecting that China, as a developing country, only has technological advantages in a small number of emerging industries. there is still a long way to go to achieve the advantages in the whole technology field or compare with developed countries in more industries.

In the future development trend, we first need to increase our own R & D capabilities, but at the same time, at the legal level of intellectual property rights, we need to continue to invest in the construction of our own intellectual property team and seek the legal services of patent lawyers. The rapid development of Chinese science and technology enterprises is bound to go through such a stage.