Six years ago, Geely and Weimar won the Geely case against trade secrets that shocked the industry at a sky-high price of 2.
1 billion.
On the evening of June 14, the intellectual property Court of the Supreme people’s Court announced the trial results of this case, believing that the case was an organized and planned large-scale recruitment of new energy vehicle technical personnel by improper means.
and the infringement of technological secrets caused by technological resources.
“it’s not easy.
It’s harder than I can imagine to give evidence behind it.
” Geely people familiar with the case told the “Automobile Commune”.
According to the information on the verdict, Geely spent more than 13 million yuan to win the case.
The Supreme people’s Court finally ruled that Weima compensated Geely for economic losses and reasonable expenses for safeguarding rights, totaling more than 640 million yuan, setting a record high for compensation in intellectual property infringement litigation in China.
However, considering that Weima Motor has entered the bankruptcy liquidation process, the total amount of claims confirmed by Weima is as high as 3.
376 billion yuan, while the total book assets of Weima after the audit is only 3.
988 billion yuan, and its liabilities are as high as 20.
367 billion yuan.
Outsiders are generally more concerned about whether the 640 million yuan can be recovered.
But for Geely, the core purpose of turning this plagiarism case into an iron case is not to get compensation, but to fight for fame.
In fact, with the internal volume of the industry in the past year or two, Geely has been emphasizing legal compliance, emphasizing originality and technology, and fighting corporate ethics warfare, behind which is a cry and appeal in the face of industry chaos.
Geely won this lawsuit, but it should be said that the symbolic significance is greater than the actual significance, and the core is to use it as a typical and sample case to remind the industry and enterprises to respect technological research and development and intellectual property rights, which strongly demonstrates the great importance that the national level attaches to the protection of automotive scientific and technological innovation, as well as its determination to protect the intellectual property rights and legitimate rights and interests of enterprises.
This point is also clearly pointed out in the disclosure of the intellectual property Court of the Supreme people’s Court: the judgment of this case has made a groundbreaking exploration in the specific way, content, and scope of civil liability to stop infringing technical secrets, as well as in refusing to perform non-pecuniary payment obligations such as stopping infringement and its calculation and payment standards.
The referee in this case is a vivid embodiment of the people’s court’s ability to perform its duties, actively standardize and guide enterprises’ compliance and integrity management, effectively protect the innovation and development of enterprises, and contribute judicial wisdom and strength to speed up the cultivation and development of new quality productive forces.
The first major case caused by job-hopping, in China’s automobile market, where there are so many car brands and fierce competition in the industry, the flow of talents in automotive technology should be a very common phenomenon.
However, with the evolution of cars towards intelligence and electrification, and the birth of more new brands, the R & D and technical personnel of many car companies have been taken away by emerging enterprises.
Although there are so-called competition agreements, more often in the past, companies have not taken very stringent measures for the phenomenon that technical teams like Geely have been packed away.
Even if they want to sue, on the one hand, it is difficult to obtain evidence in this kind of litigation.
On the other hand, at the legal level, there is no very strong force and paradigm to support the plaintiffs, so many enterprises do not come to an end in the face of such a situation.
Before studying this case, we have to talk about the relationship between Weimar and Geely Yuanyuan.
Those who are familiar with Geely and Weima all know that Shen Hui, founder of Weima, is the former core employee of Geely.
He has served as director and vice president of Geely Holdings Group, senior vice president of Volvo Automotive and chairman of China.
During his tenure at Geely, Shen Hui led the Geely team to complete the overseas acquisition of Volvo and was responsible for the landing of Volvo in the Chinese market.
When Shen Hui founded Weimar, he also took away a group of Geely’s core strength, especially in research and development, technology and quality control.
Including Dr.
Xu Huanxin, partner and chief operating officer of Weimar, who previously led new energy technologies at Volvo.
In addition, Weimar CFO Zhang ran once served as Zhou Peng, the current supervisor of Geely CFO.
, and once served as the director of Volvo’s office of chairman of China.
Of course, there are also the well-known du Ligang, Lu Bin, Hou Haijing and others, who all come from Geely’s Weimar core management, in addition to a number of related important management and technical personnel.
Shen Hui also told the media in 2016 that Weimar had more than 200 core employees at that time, all of whom were his former colleagues.
It can be said that they have mastered a large number of operational and financial core secrets of Geely and Volvo, and these operational, technical, and financial control experience can also help Weima take many detours, which is one of the reasons why Weimar developed rapidly in the new forces at that time.
However, with Geely unveiling the fig leaf of Weimar plagiarism technology in 2018 and the “sky-high price” claim of 2.
1 billion, the protection of intellectual property rights of car-building technology has once again been put on the table of the industry.
after all, the amount of claims for intellectual property disputes in China is by far the highest.
At that time, Geely used some of its former personnel as inventors or co-inventors, and applied for 12 utility model patents using the relevant new energy vehicle chassis application technology that Geely contacted and mastered, as well as the technical information carried by 12 sets of chassis parts drawings and digital models.
at the same time, Weimar launched Weimar EX series model electric vehicles in the short term without any technology accumulation or legal technology source.
Suspected of infringing upon Geely’s technical secrets, the lawsuit Weima stopped the infringement and compensated for its economic losses and reasonable expenses for safeguarding its rights totaling 2.
1 billion yuan.
The case is complex, the amount of claim is huge, and it is very critical to involve enterprises and personnel, so the dispute case quickly aroused widespread concern both inside and outside the industry at that time.
However, later, because Geely applied for a private hearing, more information and details were not known to the outside world.
In September 2022, the judgment of the first instance of the case was announced, the result showed that the plaintiff won the case, Weimar had to compensate Geely 7 million yuan, including economic losses of 5 million yuan and various expenses of 2 million yuan to stop the infringement.
in addition, Weimar was ordered to stop using five auto parts drawings used on EX5 models.
This year, Weimar encountered the most serious financial crisis, and sought IPO listing, obviously involving a major case of Weima, did not get what they wanted.
On the contrary, it brought the whole enterprise to the brink of shutdown at the end of the year.
Unexpectedly, in June 2023, Weimar was not out of danger, but the story was reversed.
In the judgment of second instance, Geely’s claim was rejected because of the lack of relevance of evidence and the imperfection of the chain of evidence.
However,After a year of game, the Supreme people’s Court finally reached a final conclusion on this matter, which is undoubtedly a strong response to Geely’s defense of its rights over the past six years, and gives Geely’s “originality” the highest protection of the law.
But for Weimar, it may be because of its own bad situation that the matter has come to a faster end.
From this point of view, it seems that it is no longer possible for Weima, which is caught in the storm of bankruptcy and restructuring, to turn around.
After all, this case has also ruled that if Weima violates the obligation to stop using the technical secrets involved in the case, the deferred performance fee should be calculated at 1 million yuan per day.
if the 12 patents involved are disposed of without authorization, each patent will be paid 1 million yuan at a time.
in addition, if the contract is not performed in accordance with the regulations, 100000 yuan in deferred performance will be supported each time.
The reason why this case has benchmarking significance is to determine how to analyze and judge the infringement of technical secrets, how to refine the civil liability to stop the infringement, how to determine the amount of damages in this case, and how to ensure the performance of non-pecuniary payment obligations.
it has set an example for similar intellectual property disputes in the future.
This is a result that everyone is happy to see, both in the legal profession and in the automobile industry.
In fact, lawsuits and cases related to trade secrets and intellectual property rights in the automobile industry are not in the minority.
Whether Honda sued Shuanghuan plagiarism, Land Rover accused Land Wind of plagiarizing the design, or Tesla and the Federal Bureau of investigation (FBI) accused Xiaopeng employees of stealing autopilot technology, most of these cases ended in difficulty in providing proof and safeguarding their rights.
Especially now that the volume in the automobile industry is intensified, the homogenization of products and technologies is becoming more and more obvious, and the flow of technical personnel among automobile manufacturers is more frequent.
After the automobile is electrified and intelligent, the importance of software has been further improved, and the flow of more software developers has also increased the risk of disclosure of business secrets to a certain extent.
Plagiarism and plagiarism are the fastest shortcuts to success.
Why many new car brands can develop rapidly in a short period of time, on the one hand, it benefits from the ecology and clusters of China’s huge industrial chain, and more importantly, the flow of core technical personnel, as well as the lack of knowledge behind the flow, or the leakage of intellectual property rights, which is difficult to obtain evidence, has indeed brought more shortcuts to the emerging new power brands.
According to data, up to 59% of former employees admitted to taking away confidential company documents and data when they left.
Nowadays, many enterprises have stepped up their efforts to crack down on employees’ theft of company trade secrets, violating business competition restrictions, leaking company trade secrets to third parties or even direct competitors, showing a resolute attitude of pursuing legal responsibility.
Although almost all technology enterprises have strict secrecy and self-protection regulations, but driven by interests, the theft of company secrets is endless.
There is no doubt that while the automobile core technology has increasingly become the key competitiveness of enterprises, automobile companies pay more and more attention to the protection of intellectual property rights.
Therefore, with the core staff job-hopping, the phenomenon of being poached is also more and more, which also gives rise to a lot of legal problems.
As the flow of talent becomes more and more frequent, trade secrets and intellectual property protection are becoming more and more important.
Just as Geely Li Shufu talked about the internal volume at the Chongqing Forum before, he pointed out that the internal volume of sound law, strict law enforcement and transparent and fair competition is a good thing.
Only by competing healthily according to law can we achieve sustainable and high-quality development.
The achievements of electric vehicles that have been made in China can be consolidated and respected.
Li Shufu also said that there is no shortage of car-making enterprises in China today, but there is a lack of car companies with original capabilities.
The nature of the industry determines that automobile enterprises themselves should attach great importance to the awareness of compliance and moral bottom line.
Enterprises should make the long-term and sustainable development of enterprises from the perspective of giving priority to consumers’ rights and interests and from the perspective of legal compliance and global compliance.
At present, the development of China’s automobile has risen to a new level, and China’s awareness and system of automobile intellectual property rights are also maturing.
Especially now new energy vehicles have become the core force for Chinese cars to become increasingly powerful and go overseas, so every innovation needs to be treated fairly and fairly, and every original spirit can be treated with due respect.
It is obvious that Geely’s market performance, ability and reputation today are compared with the state and situation of Weima and other new power enterprises.
Car-building is a marathon, and automobile companies need to return to rationality and value.
Full of integrity, justice, compliance, law and morality, the so-called earthly path is the vicissitudes of life.
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