It has proved to be extremely difficult to obtain any exact and reliable information concerning the number of intellectual property cases in the courts and outright impossible to obtain such information broken down according to types of rights and types of cases, the reason being that no such breakdown exists in the statistical information available at our central court administration. The information below is, therefore, based on personal inquiries at some courts which are of special importance in this respect. The information relates only to civil cases; no specific information is available on the number of criminal cases, the reason being that those which concern intellectual property are not singled out in the statistics and, furthermore, intellectual property violations frequently are linked to other types of offences/crimes and thus disappear in the statistics.
Generally speaking, the impression of the authorities is that the number of both civil and criminal cases has been steadily increasing during the last ten years.
As regards the proceedings in the ordinary courts, civil litigation in patent cases is concentrated in the Stockholm City Court and in practice also most civil litigation occurs in that Court. According to the information provided by the Court, 31 cases have been filed in the course of 1996 and 20 cases between 1 January 1997 and 30 November 1997.
As regards administrative proceedings, which are perhaps of less interest from an enforcement point of view, the normal route is that rejections of applications for industrial property rights may be appealed against to the Patent Court (which is the second instance) and from there to the Supreme Administrative Court. Each year about 100 patent cases go to the Patent Court and about 700 cases relating to other industrial property rights, primarily trademark rights. The Supreme Administrative Court received 95 appeals from the Patent Court in 1996 and 61 cases during the first 11 months of 1997.
