| Popis: |
Punitive damages, a traditional system under the common law, aims to sanction those infringers having substantially subjective malice by awarding enhanced damages beyond the actual damages. It is naturally different from compensatory damages. Punitive damages were originally used to dealing with serious violations of the victims’ dignity of the cases. With the development of economic society, this system was gradually used to punishing corporations and sanctioning economic crimes. Since Taiwanese tort laws are mainly inherited from German laws, which only permit plaintiffs claiming for compensatory damages. Punitive damages were only adopted in several specific kinds of tort laws, as in the patent law. However, the provision of punitive damages was revoked in the current patent reform act drafted by Ministry of Economic Affairs. This study starts out by introducing the trend of American law, the essential practical cases, and the recent patent reform acts. It concludes the trend to have the following three characteristics: 1. Strictly limit the constitution of willful infringement; 2. Increase patentee’s burden of proof; and 3. Restrict the scope of awarding punitive damages. The study then empirically analyzes the related judgments of Taiwan Intellectual Property Count over the years. It finds that in majority of the cases claiming punitive damages, most plaintiffs can even not to prove that defendants have infringed their patents, yet force defendants to settle. Also, the court in Taiwan usually award patentees punitive damages loosely only if they can prove that infringers had known the existence of the patent. This phenomenon makes the standard in practice not strict as the standard in law. Lastly, this study sums up the aspects from the development trend of American patent law, current practice in Taiwan, the theory of punitive damages function, and economic analysis of law, and finds that it would be inappropriate to revoke the provision of punitive damages in patent infringement cases. This study suggests that punitive damages should be awarded only in two types of willful infringement: 1. when the defendant is a “free rider, or 2. when the validity of the patent need not be challenged anymore. This way, it may lower the cost of research and development, give developers more chance to challenge junk patents, and finally reach the purpose of patent law – encourage innovation. |
