Criteria For The Determination Of "Serious Circumstances" Of Punitive Compensation For Trademark Infringement

According to economic theory,no matter it is a company legal person or a natural person,all of them will face the problem of asymmetric information when trading,and the trademark system is the most convenient and effective way that human beings have made so far to solve this problem.the trademark will reveal the source of goods or services,and then the main parties of the transaction will be fastened,which will make trades to be carried out efficiently and orderly.Preventing the infringement of the right to exclusive use of trademarks should be and has become one of the urgent tasks in the legislation,law enforcement and prudent justice of all countries that have established the market economy system.To intensify protection of trademark,punitive compensation system has been introduced in Chinese trademark law since 2013.But by counting and analysing the cases of infringement of the right to exclusive use of trademarks after that,we found that cases that the Chinese court apply punitive compensation system on are very few,which are far from the expected goal.The reason for this situation is that,punitive compensation system is far different from "filling principle" of civil tort which we get used to in the past,besides there is no detailed and feasible regulation on how to apply Chinese trademark law’s Article 63 Paragraph 1 in legislation,and the judges of the court tend to play "statutory damages" within the scope of their discretion.The first chapter of this article will summarize the relevant cases ruled after2013,and we discovered that not having a unified standard of "serious circumstances " is also the cause of why punitive damages system is being less applied than we expected,except for procedural reasons.In order to solve this problem,the chapter is divided into two sections to discuss the two specific problems existing in the identification standard of "serious circumstances",which lays a foundation for putting forward more targeted countermeasures below.Under the premise that Chinese mainland do not have relevant judicial explanation or legislation,and the system of punitive damages is a result of Leagal Transplant,and some developed countries or regions had already developed some relatively mature and rational experience,the second chapter of this paper therefore introduces some legislative provisions or judicial experience on this topic in turn in the United States,the United Kingdom and Chinese Taiwan,and lists the effective enlightenment for the identification standard of "serious circumstances" in Chinese mainland,with the purpose of drawing on the strengths of many scholars.The third chapter is the core part of this article,which is about how to establish the standard of "serious circumstances" of punitive damages for trademark infringement in China.In this chapter,compared with many common law countries while applying punitive compensation system in trademark law,there is one more requirement of "serious circumstances" literally in Chinese trademark law,so I decide to start from the legitimacy and necessity of the existence of "serious circumstances",and clarify the ideas for the construction of subsequent identification standards.At the same time,the conclusion of the second chapter will be combined with China’s scientific research theory on this aspect.Considering China’s current national conditions,the structures of this chapter are as follow: the specific direction of "serious circumstances" →the grasp principle of "serious circumstances" →the specific identification standard of "serious circumstances".Finally,the question raised in this article is completely answered,and hoping this article can provide some help for in Chinese court applying trademark punitive damages system on trademark law.