In this Insights, we look at the raw material for CIELA itself
– the civil decisions from which we extract our data.
How complete and up-to-date is the information?
While China's Supreme People's Court (SPC) requires
publication of most decisions, China's legal system is not
based on case law, and in reality only a portion of decisions are
publicly available. Based on the SPC's publishes annual
statistics of IP cases, and the decisions published in the main
official source, China Judgements Online (“Wenshu”), we
estimate that, for patent litigation cases, around 50% of these
cases have been published at all levels of courts. And how quickly
are those decisions made public? While we have no clear measurement
of this, it is clear from Wenshu that publication of cases trickles
in over a period of months. This means that a focus on up-to-date
and complete litigation data is missing the point – China
does not have the equivalent of the USA's Pacer to track new
decisions
