In Taiwan, if a company is found to infringe a patent, not only the company itself, but the company’s legal representative, and sometimes the company’s employees, can be liable.
According to the Civil Code and the Company Act of Taiwan, a company’s legal representative is jointly and severally liable for acts of patent infringement committed by the company. In principle, the legal representative cannot seek liability exemption by asserting that he is not the actual decision maker. There have been many infringement cases in which the complainant names a company’s legal representative as a co-defendant. This may give the defendants more pressure and thus increase the complainant’s chances of recovering full damages if the complainant wins.
There are no statutory provisions in either the Civil Code or the Company Act concerning the joint and several liability of employees in the case of patent infringement. A complainant would generally assert a claim of liability against employees of an infringing company based on the Civil Code for committing joint infringement with their employing company. However, employees are rarely held liable for joint infringement with their employing companies in court judgments as the court adopted an opinion that employees in general work under the direction of their company and such acts as manufacture and sale of products of the company can hardly be attributable to individual employees in view of the fine division of labor in today’s companies.
In a patent infringement lawsuit filed by Richtek Technology Corporation against uPI Semiconductor Corporation in respect of a power management IC product, Richtek sued not only uPI for manufacture and sale of the patented power management IC product, they also sued uPI’s several employees, who previously worked for Richtek, for joint infringement with uPI. The second-instance IP Court ruled that the employees were not jointly liable. But the Supreme Court reversed the IP Court’s opinion, holding that if uPI’s manufacture and sale of the infringing product were indeed attributable to the assistance of the former employees of Richtek, the employees should be jointly liable with uPI.
The Taiwan Supreme Court’s such holding is in a way similar to the U.S. court’s opinion in patent infringement cases that the corporate veil need not be pierced in determining whether corporate officers or employees are liable for indirect infringement.