On September 14, 2023, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate (SPP) released the 48th group of guiding cases with the theme of “Comprehensive Procuratorial protection of IP rights”. The cases have significant prison sentences for copyright infringement and false copyright litigation. For example, in one case, the defendant was sentenced to three years and six months in prison for copyright infringement and a fine of 1.5 million RMB. In another case, the defendant was sentenced to four years in prison and a fine of 360,000 RMB for copyright infringement.

The SPP stated, that pretending to be the author, using works created by others, and using this as the main evidence to file a lawsuit to obtain unlawful benefits, harming the legitimate rights and interests of others, and obstructing judicial order constitutes a false lawsuit. The copyright registration certificate is one of the most commonly used pieces of evidence in copyright ownership and infringement disputes. However, when registering a copyright, there is no substantive examination of whether the work was created by the applicant and whether it is original. In fact, it is difficult to prevent malicious copyright registration. Deliberately submitting false application to fraudulently obtain copyright registration for other people's work, and then using the fraudulent copyright registration certificate to file a lawsuit to obtain unlawful benefits, is a typical false lawsuit in the intellectual property field.

To sum up, the SPP claimed, when there are cases of civil litigation supervision of copyright ownership and infringement disputes, in addition to examining the copyright registration certificate, it is important to examine the creative manuscripts, original and other evidentiary materials. It is vital to investigate and verify whether the work was created by someone else and whether the creation was completed as stated in the registration certificate.