THE Shenzhen Administration for Market Regulation has taken the lead in building an online intellectual property rights (IPR) protection platform in China, which enables information technology to play a greater role in e-commerce IP-related disputes, Shenzhen Economic Daily reported yesterday.

Tang Qinzong, an IPR inspection official from the administration, said that law enforcement is made more difficult due to the virtual, cross-region and cross-platform characteristics of internet crimes, because law enforcers have to find out the entities behind the virtual subjects, and determine and associate the internet crimes with facts.

“IPR protection in the digital society must make full use of big data technology, open up different data pools, form a joint force, and explore new paths to protect intellectual property in the digital era,” Tang was quoted as saying.

The administration inde-pendently developed the collaborative cloud platform in 2019 based on an original special tool for online law enforcement.

The platform is formed by multiple functional components and caters to different needs.

The IPR protection ecosystem built on the platform includes administrative units, judicial organs, judicial appraisal institutions, scholars, enterprises and e-commerce platforms, which enables online data connectivity and response. The open collaboration mechanism also ensures the scalability of resource capabilities.

Over the past two years, the platform has been constantly practicing new modes of IPR protection.

According to Tang, the administration is actively carrying out business communication with Shenzhen Customs and Shenzhen Procuratorate, as well as studying how to make the platform cover a broader market field.

According to Shenzhen’s IPR whitepaper for 2021, a total of 279,177 patents from Shenzhen were granted in China last year, an increase of 25.52% year on year.

For every 10,000 Shenzhen residents, there were 112 invention patents, about 5.7 times the national average.

The city has also filed the most Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applications among large- and medium-sized cities in China for 18 years, with 17,443 PCT applications in 2021. (Zhang Yu)