On March 13 the Fourth Plenary Meeting of the 5th Session of the 10th NPC was convened in the Great Hall of the People, at which a report on the work of the Supreme People's Court (SPC) was delivered by its Chief Justice Xiao Yang. He pointed out, intellectual property (IP) criminal infringement must be punished severely according to law and IP protection should be strengthened with greater efforts in order to promote harmonious social development. 　

At first, Xiao Yang reviewed the work of the SPC in 2006. He said, last year China cracked down upon IP criminal infringements and closed a total of 2,277 cases of IP infringement committed by sham, piratical and other means, and punished 3,508 criminals. Among them there are 153,724 given set term imprisonment of over five years, life imprisonment and death sentence.  

He stressed , in order to boost the building up of the court self-innovation capacity and a state innovation system, people's courts at all levels stepped up efforts on judicial IP protection in 2006, punished IP infringement behaviors and completed 14,056 IP cases of first instance, with money amounting to RMB2.71 billion. Among the total, 5,751 are copyright infringements, 2,378 are trademark infringements, 3,227 are patent infringements and 1,188 are illegal competitions.

At the time of planning the work for 2007, Xiao Yang emphasized that harmonious social development should be promoted and cases be tried that involve environment infringement, structure transformation of state-owned enterprises, financial business, IP dispute, maritime affairs and claims, foreign affairs as well as those cases that relate to Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan regions in order to maintain the market economic order with fair, orderly and lawful competition, and guarantee better and faster development of social economy.