The Intellectual Property Tribunal of the Supreme People’s Court issued a final judgment on June 24, 2026, in case (2024)最高法知民终907号 published September 4, 2026, resolving an appeal from a Guangzhou Intellectual Property Court decision in a dispute over statutory inventor remuneration for a service invention. The court held that a company owes its inventor a share of the operating profit generated by a patented invention whenever the invention is commercially implemented and the relevant product generates profit in a given year, regardless of whether the product is profitable overall across its commercial life. Applying this standard, the court ordered the defendant company to pay the inventor a lump sum of RMB 800,000 in remuneration, reversing the trial court’s dismissal of the inventor’s claims in their entirety.

Chinese patent law imposes an obligation on employers that has no direct counterpart in the United States. Under U.S. law, an employee inventor’s rights are governed by contract: employment agreements typically require assignment of inventions to the employer in exchange for salary, and no federal statute entitles the inventor to ongoing compensation tied to the invention’s commercial success. Chinese law takes a different approach for “service inventions” (职务发明), meaning inventions made by an employee in the course of their employment duties or using the employer’s resources. Article 6 of the Patent Law assigns ownership of such inventions to the employer, but in exchange, the employer is statutorily obligated to compensate the inventor in two distinct ways. First, Article 16 of the Patent Law (as it existed prior to the 2020 amendment; now addressed in Article 15 and related implementing regulations) requires the employer to pay the inventor a reward (奖励) simply for the invention being patented, typically a modest fixed sum tied to filing and grant, unrelated to commercial performance. Second, and more substantially, Article 15 requires the employer to pay the inventor reasonable remuneration (报酬) once the patented invention is put into commercial use, calculated with reference to the scope of its application and the economic benefit obtained. Where the employer has not separately contracted with the inventor or adopted internal rules specifying the amount, the default statutory rates apply under Article 45 of the Law on Promoting the Transformation of Scientific and Technological Achievements: if the employer commercializes the invention itself, it must pay the inventor no less than five percent of the operating profit attributable to the invention, each year for three to five consecutive years starting from the year commercial implementation succeeds. This scheme functions as a mandatory profit-sharing mechanism, layered on top of ordinary salary, specifically designed to align inventor incentives with the employer’s success in commercializing patented technology. It cannot generally be waived, although the employer and inventor can adopt an internal award/compensation policy setting different amounts, so long as the policy is reasonable.

The case arose from a dispute between Wang, a Canadian national who worked as Senior Director of Formulation Process Development at the defendant company (presumably Bio Thera Solutions Ltd.) from 2016 to 2021, and the company, which had named him as one of six co-inventors on a patent covering a formulation for treating TNF-α related diseases. The patent was implemented in the company’s product Gele Li, a biosimilar adalimumab injection that launched in late 2019 or early 2020. Wang sued for both a share of patent ownership and inventor remuneration, seeking payments calculated as a percentage of the product’s revenue or operating profit for multiple years, along with confirmation that he held a 70% ownership interest in the patent. The company resisted on several grounds, arguing that Wang had made no real inventive contribution, that the patent covered only a minor part of the overall product technology, that Gele Li had not generated overall profit since launch, and that it had already paid inventor rewards under an internal policy.

The trial court dismissed all of Wang’s claims. It found that Wang was properly listed as an inventor and had already received a one-time reward payment for a related priority application, and that this reward was distinct from any remuneration claim. On remuneration, the trial court held that Wang bore the burden of proving that Gele Li had generated profit, and that because the company’s financial reports showed net losses in most years, and because Wang refused to prepay the cost of a specific audit into the product’s profitability, he could not meet that burden. It also rejected his ownership claim as unsupported and inconsistent with his remuneration theory.

On appeal, the Supreme People’s Court largely upheld the trial court’s findings on inventor status and reward but reversed on the remuneration issue. The court confirmed that being listed as an inventor at the time of filing creates a presumption of substantive creative contribution, and that a patent owner cannot later disavow that designation without evidence that the original listing did not reflect genuine intent. It rejected the company’s argument that Wang made no contribution, finding this position inconsistent with the company’s own conduct in listing him as an inventor and previously paying him a reward tied to the related priority application. At the same time, the court rejected Wang’s expanded claim to be the sole inventor, finding no evidentiary basis for that assertion, and rejected his claim to a 70% ownership share in the patent as both unsupported and legally incompatible with his separate remuneration theory.

On the central issue of remuneration, the court held that the relevant statutory test under the Patent Law and the Law on Promoting the Transformation of Scientific and Technological Achievements looks to whether the implementing product generated operating profit in a given year during the period following commercial launch, not whether the product achieved net profitability over its full commercial life. The trial court’s approach, which effectively required proof of overall profitability before any remuneration could be owed, was found to misapply this standard and to create excessive uncertainty for inventors seeking payment. The court also found that requiring Wang to bear audit costs to prove the product’s profitability was inappropriate given that the relevant financial data was held exclusively by the company. Rather than remanding for an audit, the appellate court exercised its authority to order the company to submit a statement of Gele Li’s revenue and profit directly, and found that this submission was corroborated by the company’s own audited financial reports.

Based on that submitted data, the court found that Gele Li had generated operating profit in at least some years since its 2020 launch. It then calculated remuneration by determining that the patent’s contribution to the product’s overall value was limited to 20 percent, reasoning that the product’s core value derived from the underlying antibody rather than the formulation covered by the patent, and that additional value derived from unpatented production processes and from personnel involved in commercializing the invention. The court divided this contribution equally among the six co-inventors, absent evidence differentiating their individual contributions, and applied the statutory minimum rate of five percent of operating profit over a five-year period from 2020 through 2024. Applying these factors to the profit figures submitted by the company, the court arrived at a lump-sum remuneration award of RMB 800,000, and specified that this payment satisfied the company’s remuneration obligation for the patent going forward, such that no further annual payments would be required.

The full text of the decision is available here (Chinese only).