Those are not "numbers they release". They are statistics collected by a researcher who read court proceedings of 1663 patent infringement cases decided in China in 2014. (EDIT: Originally said "all" cases and "between 2014 and 2018". As virtue3 points out below, that was incorrect). It's not something that can be manipulated by just changing a number in a spreadsheet.
See Chao Ma, Xiaohong Yu & Haibo He, Data Analysis: Report on the Publication of Chinese Judicial
Decisions on the Internet, China Law Review 12(4), 2016: 208. (Table 10 lists the ratios of the number of
judicial documents of each province publicly available on CJO to the number of cases adjudicated in each
province, ranging from 15.17% to 78.14%.)
So cherry-picked cases that range from 15-78% of the data set.
Doesn't the US have a huge problem with IP trolls? It's really hard to get an accurate figure when the US can just issue IPs like it's no one's business and can to go to court to dispute these equally as easily. At least here in Europe, it's a lot more difficult to file for patents, I've not found any conclusive numbers, but if you can extrapolate from these numbers here I would say that the US is the outlyer rather than the norm https://www.simmons-simmons.com/en/publications/ck0d2ofe9u6d...
> So cherry-picked cases that range from 15-78% of the data set.
That's a fair point, although what kind of case would be a "cherry" is not clear to me. Both a foreign company winning (implying that patent infringement happened) and losing (possibly feeding suspicion that the judicial system is biased against foreigners) could end up making China look bad.
> 1.6k patent cases over multiple years seems -extremely- low to me.
My mistake. When I checked the blog post by the author of the paper for a date range, I thought it was since 2014 (and until publication in 2018), but actually those cases were all in 2014. (See page 10 of the paper.)
And the Chinese court system isn't rule by Law.. it's easily manipulated by outside influence and personal opinions. I wouldn't trust any conviction results from their court systems.
