Hanwang handwriting identifying technology wins the IP case,Taiwan Jingpin shall indemnify 3.1 million yuan

April 19, 2005
First-instance judgment was given recently to the 4-year-long IP dispute over Hanwang handwriting identifying technology, the court decided that Taiwan Jingpin Co. and Zhongshan Mingren Co. both constitute IP infringement to the Hanwang Technology. Hanwang Technology won the suit, Taiwan Jingpin Science & Technology Co., Ltd. and Zhongshan Mingren Computer Development Co., Ltd. shall stop the infringement, and jointly compensate Hanwang 2.8 million yuan; and the plaintiff Taiwan Jingpin Science and Technology Co., Ltd. shall solely compensate Hanwang 300.000 yuan. This IP case is the first software copyright dispute case on the Chinese mainland related with Taiwan. There were some problems in the course of hearing, and this is one reason why it takes over 4 years in investigating and hearing the case till the first-sentence judgment was given; on the other hand, the software piracy cases are usually highly concealed, the difficulty in taking evidence is another reason why the hearing took so long. Hanwang should be very delighted for the winning of first-instance judgment, but in the whole course, it has suffered huge loss, especially from 2000 to 2001 when the domestic PDA market was booming. In these two years, the Hanwang handwriting identifying technology encountered piracy; the loss is imaginable. Even if it has won in the first-sentence judgment, the effective execution of the judgment becomes another problem. For the moment, regardless if Hanwang’s loss can be compensated by winning the suit, from the point of view of national software enterprises on the whole, this is a positive case rendering us many new views over the domestic software industry. In the background of “severely infringing IP” of the current domestic industry as blamed by other countries, many domestic businesses were referred to the court, but the infringements to their own IP were ended with nothing definite. The Hanwang IP case warns the national IP businesses to protect their own rights and interests via legal means.

　

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