——When "Yunnan Flavor" Meets Patent Infringement, Witnessing How China's Judiciary Guards Agricultural Sci-Tech Innovation
Introduction
Deep in the rainforests of Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, a black boletus strain numbered YL1701-2 embodies the technological leap of China's edible fungi industry from traditional cultivation to industrial production. Yet when this strain, the fruit of years of painstaking research, was "cloned", a four-year-plus intellectual property (IP) protection battle not only altered the fates of the parties involved, but also established pivotal judicial adjudication rules for strain infringement cases in China's edible saprobic fungi sector.
I. A Strain's Technological Breakthrough: Industrial Upgrading from Wild Growth to Factory Cultivation
Boletus, a prized delicacy that graces Yunnan people's summer dining tables with a unique flavor, has long been plagued by the predicament of "relying on the whims of nature". Under traditional cultivation models, black boletus suffers from a long growth cycle, rollercoaster-like yield fluctuations and weak stress resistance—factors that have severely hindered the large-scale development of the industry.
The R&D team of Jinghong Hongzhen Agricultural Technology Co., Ltd. set out to solve this problem with science and technology. Leveraging Xishuangbanna's unique climatic and ecological resources, the team adopted sexual cross-breeding technology and, after countless screenings and cultivations, finally bred the new black boletus strain YL1701-2. This strain's outstanding strengths include strong genetic stability, vigorous mycelial activity, fast and uniform fruiting in the later stage, and a significant improvement in growth efficiency. These traits enabled its successful industrial and large-scale cultivation, transforming a "seasonal delicacy" into a "standardized product available all year round".
For agricultural sci-tech enterprises, bacterial strains are core competitiveness—a fact well understood by Hongzhen Company. In February 2019, the company deposited this "labor of love" with the China General Microbiological Culture Collection Center (CGMCC No.17073); it filed an invention patent application in June of the same year, and was officially granted patent authorization in August 2021 (Patent No. ZL201910507481.3). A comprehensive IP layout should have served as a "moat" to protect this innovative achievement.
Yet the market is always full of uncertainties.
II. Undercurrents: The Hidden Chain of a Former Employee and a "Cloned Strain"
In 2021, Hongzhen Company detected anomalies through market monitoring: suspected infringing black boletus products had appeared on the market. After a thorough investigation, the suspicion fell on Xishuangbanna Linxiang Wanli Agricultural Technology Co., Ltd.—and to Hongzhen's great shock, Zhou, the legal representative of Linxiang Wanli, was a former employee of the company.
Through relevant stalls in agricultural markets, Linxiang Wanli sold a large quantity of suspected infringing black boletus products. This "familiar formula" is not uncommon in IP infringement cases: after resigning, technical personnel use the core technical information they master to quickly replicate their former employer's technological achievements through shell companies, seizing market share at low cost. For Hongzhen, which had invested heavily in R&D, this meant not only economic losses, but also a heavy blow to its motivation for innovation.
In October 2021, Hongzhen Company filed a lawsuit with the Kunming Intermediate People's Court, officially launching this IP protection battle for black boletus strains. This was not only an attempt by an enterprise to safeguard its own rights and interests, but also bore the eager expectations of China's edible fungi industry for IP protection—after all, this was the first strain infringement case in China's edible saprobic fungi sector following the Shanghai Fengke "white shimeji mushroom case".
III. Setback in the First Instance: The Technical Trap of Appraisal Methods
The core and sharp dispute of the case was clear: did the boletus sold by Linxiang Wanli fall within the protection scope of the patent claims in question?
In the first instance, with the consent of both parties, the court commissioned the Beijing Guochuang Dingcheng IP Application Technology Research Institute to conduct a judicial appraisal. The appraisal institution adopted two methods: ITSrDNA sequence consistency testing and SSR fingerprinting consistency testing. Yet this appraisal became the pivotal turning point in the first-instance judgment.
The problem lay in technical details: the appraisal institution did not use the industry-standard M13 primer in the SSR fingerprinting test. This deviation in technical selection led to a systematic shift in the test results, ultimately concluding that the alleged infringing product was not the same strain as that described in the patent specification of the case. In June 2023, the first-instance court dismissed all of Hongzhen Company's claims on this basis.
For Hongzhen Company, this was undoubtedly a "technical knockout". In microbial patent infringement cases, appraisal conclusions are often decisive, and the choice of appraisal methods and control of experimental conditions directly influence the outcome. The defeat in the first instance exposed deep-seated difficulties in microbial patent rights protection: high technical thresholds, complex appraisal standards, and immature adjudication rules.
IV. Reversal in the Second Instance: The Supreme People's Court Establishes Core Rules for Strain Protection
Hongzhen Company did not give up. It filed an appeal with the Supreme People's Court of China, citing core reasons including the erroneous determination of the patent's protection scope, the first instance court's refusal to approve a re-appraisal, and relevant evidence such as the former employee status of Zhou, the legal representative of Linxiang Wanli.
On December 31, 2025, the Supreme People's Court issued a final judgment, marking the "highlight moment" of the case. Based on the established facts, the second-instance court made several key determinations:
1. Determination of Infringing Acts: A Complete and Closed Evidentiary Chain
The Supreme People's Court found that Zhou, the legal representative of Linxiang Wanli, had once been an employee of Hongzhen Company, and Zhou's mother, Tang, was responsible for operating the agricultural market stalls selling the alleged infringing products. Combined with evidence such as photos recorded in the notarial certificate, it was sufficient to confirm that Linxiang Wanli had committed the acts of manufacturing and selling the alleged infringing products. This determination solved the common "subject isolation" problem in infringement cases—evading liability through family division of labor, corporate shell isolation and other means becomes futile in the face of a complete evidentiary chain.
2. Core Rule for Protection Scope: The Legal Status of Deposited Strains
Addressing the core dispute over the patent's protection scope, the Supreme People's Court made a landmark ruling:
"For invention patents for which microbial strains have been legally deposited, the protection scope shall be based on the deposited strain recorded in the patent claims. Information such as SSR fingerprinting recorded in the specification is mainly used for interpretation and auxiliary identification, and cannot replace the core status of the deposited strain."
The establishment of this adjudication rule clarified the long-standing confusion in determining the protection scope of microbial patents. In microbial patents, the boundaries of patent claims are often difficult to define due to the living activity and mutability of strains themselves. The Supreme People's Court clearly stated that the deposited strain is the "anchor point" for determining the protection scope, while molecular marker information such as SSR fingerprinting is only a tool for auxiliary identification and cannot overshadow the main body.
3. Ascertainment of Technical Facts: Penetrating the Mist of Data Deviation
Technically, although there were differences between the alleged infringing product and the SSR fingerprinting recorded in the patent specification, the Supreme People's Court adopted the comparison opinion from the first commissioned appraisal, concluding that these differences were the result of regular and overall data deviation caused by systemic differences in the appraisal experiment (such as the failure to use the M13 primer), rather than substantive differences between the strains themselves.
Ultimately, through a comparison of the ITSrDNA sequences (100% similarity) and an analysis of the high consistency of the SSR fingerprinting, the Supreme People's Court determined that the alleged infringing product was the same strain as Hongzhen Company's deposited strain, constituting an infringement.
V. 400,000 Yuan in Compensation and the Unawarded Punitive Damages: The Art of Judicial Balance
In determining the compensation amount, the Supreme People's Court comprehensively considered factors such as the type of patent in question, the nature of the infringing acts, the business scale of the infringer, and Hongzhen Company's R&D investment, and discretionarily awarded a total of 400,000 yuan in compensation and reasonable expenses, while revoking the first-instance judgment.
Notably, Hongzhen Company's claim for punitive damages was not supported. The Supreme People's Court held that the existing evidence was insufficient to prove that the infringement circumstances were serious. This determination reflected judicial prudence: as a "sharp sword" for IP protection, the application of punitive damages requires strict elements—such as obvious subjective malice and serious infringement circumstances. In this case, although the infringement was committed by a former employee after resignation, the statutory threshold of "serious circumstances" was not met.
For a four-year-plus rights protection battle, the 400,000-yuan compensation may hardly fully cover Hongzhen Company's actual losses. But from a broader perspective, the value of this case far exceeds economic compensation—the adjudication rules it established will provide an important reference for subsequent similar cases and reduce the uncertain costs of rights protection.
VI. Lessons from the Case: Three Key Pillars of Agricultural IP Protection
As the "first strain infringement case in the edible saprobic fungi sector", this case offers profound insights for agricultural sci-tech innovation and IP protection in China:
First, technical deposit is the "foundation of right confirmation". The particularity of microbial patents lies in the fact that technical characteristics cannot be fully defined by written descriptions. Timely depositing strains with authoritative collection institutions is a statutory requirement for establishing the protection scope of patent rights, and also "irrefutable evidence" in rights protection.
