Recently, Partner Mr. Yuan Yang and Attorney Mrs. Hu Hongfang of DeBund’s IP team assisted Beijing Watertek Information Technology Co., Ltd. (“WATERTEK”) in obtaining a favorable final judgement in an invention patent infringement case against Netac Technology Co., Ltd. (“Netac”). The case has taken 8 years and gone through the first instance, the second instance and retrial. 

On May 15, 2012, Netac filed a lawsuit against WATERTEK, Agricultural Bank of China (ABC China), and ABC China Beihai Industrial Park Branch before the Nanning Intermediate People’s Court, alleging WATERTEK’s ComyiKEY220 product infringed its invention patent (ZL99117225.6). Netac’s claims included: 1) requesting three defendants to cease infringement acts of Netac’s invention patent (ZL99117225.6); 2)  requesting WATERTEK to cease manufacture, sale and offer for sale of the ComyiKEY220 products; 3) requesting ABC China and ABC China Beihai Industrial Park Branch to cease sale and offer for sale of the ComyiKEY220 products; 4) requesting three defendants to jointly compensate damages of RMB 60 Mio.; 5) requesting three defendants to jointly undertake the litigation fee.

Netac’s patent in dispute is one of its core technologies and is widely applied in its USB flash disk products. Netac successfully filed over sixteen lawsuits against companies in the same technology field on the basis of infringement of such patent. The patent kept valid after it was challenged for invalidations before the Reexamination and Invalidation Department of the Patent Office, CNIPA for 13 times by different applicants.

On June 25th, 2015, the Nanning Intermediate People’s Court issued a judgement in favor of Netac, according to which WATERTEK was ruled to pay RMB 40 Mio. to Netac for its “patent infringement”.

DeBund represented WATERTEK to appeal before the High People’s Court of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. On September 5th, 2016, the above court ruled to revoke the judgement of first instance and remand the case back to the Nanning Intermediate People’s Court for a new trial.

After a new trial, the Nanning Intermediate People’s Court sustained the first-instance judgment On July 9th, 2018((2016) Gui 01 Min Chu No. 577), confirming the compensation of RMB 40 Mio. to be paid by WATERTEK.

The satisfactory result came after DeBund’s appeal before the High People’s Court of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. The High People’s Court of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region eventually issued a final judgement ((2018) Gui Min Zhong No. 720) in favor of WATERTEK in which the previous judgement (2016) Gui 01 Min Chu No. 577 was revoked and all litigation claims of Netac were rejected.