Supreme Court Ruling: Misappropriating Others' Technical Work For Patents Violates Attribution Rights

The Supreme People’s Court has issued a final judgment in a case concerning the right to be named as the inventor of a patented invention. The ruling clarifies that in disputes over inventor attribution, the party claiming to be the inventor bears the burden of proving that they made a substantive contribution to the invention. The court should make an overall assessment based on factors such as the individual’s professional background, job responsibilities, and familiarity with the invention in question. This case serves as a warning against falsely claiming inventor status and against dishonest conduct in innovation activities and patent application procedures.

A, a chip architecture engineer at a company, prepared a draft technical document in July 2022 and uploaded it to the company’s internal system in September 2022. In December 2023, A discovered that B, an employee from a different department, had used part of that technical document as the basis for four patent applications