On December 21, 2023, China’s National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) updated the “Regulations regulating the act of applying for patents” (规范申请专利行为的规定) effective January 20, 2024. The Regulations require compliance with the good faith requirement in filing of patent applications per Article 11 of the just-released Implementing Regulations of the Patent Law and defines what is abnormal patent application filing behavior. China has been continuously cracking down on abnormal patent application filings with almost 1 million Chinese patent applications identified as abnormal in 2022.

Article 3 has been updated to define abnormal patent application behavior as follows:

1. The submission of multiple patent applications with significantly identical inventive content or those formed by simply combining different inventive features or elements.
2. Patent applications that involve the fabrication, forgery, alteration of inventive content, experimental data, or technical effects, or that plagiarize, replace, or piece together existing technology or designs.
3. Patent applications whose inventive content is primarily randomly generated through computer technologies or the like.
4. Patent applications with inventive content that clearly does not conform to the principles of technological improvement or design, or that degrade, amass, or unnecessarily limit the scope of protection.
5. Applicants submitting multiple patent applications without actual research and development activities and who cannot provide reasonable explanations.
6. The malicious dispersal or sequentially or heterogeneously filing of multiple patent applications substantially associated with a specific entity, individual, or address.
7. The transfer or acquisition of patent application rights for improper purposes, or the fraudulent change of inventors or designers.
8. Other abnormal patent application behaviors that violate the principle of good faith and disrupt the normal order of patent work.

Besides potentially facing a fine of up to 100,000 RMB for violating the good faith requirement per the newly amended Implementing Regulations, Article 9 specifies the following punishments for filing abnormal applications:

(1) The patent fee will not be reduced [entitled to Chinese small entity status] for the abnormal patent application; for applicants who have carried out abnormal patent application behavior multiple times within five years and other serious circumstances, the [normal] patent applications will not be entitled to reduced fees; if the payment has been reduced, the person is required to pay the relevant reduced payment fees;
(2) Making an announcement on the government website of the administrative department for patent under the State Council and the relevant media, and incorporating the relevant information into the national credit information sharing platform;
(3) Anyone who carries out abnormal patent application behavior that harms social and public interests and is subject to heavier administrative penalties by market supervision and management and other departments shall be included in the market supervision and management serious illegal and dishonest list in accordance with relevant national regulations;
(4) deducting from the statistics of the number of patent applications filed by the administrative department for patent under the State Council the number of patent applications relating to the abnormal patent applications;
(5) No funding or rewards will be provided to applicants and relevant agencies; if funding was provided, all or part of the funding or rewards must be returned.