“A patent ownership dispute concerns a disagreement over who owns a patent. It is different from a patent invalidation proceeding, which attacks the validity of specific patents. Generally, if a dispute can be resolved through ownership litigation, the latter strategy (invalidation) is not pursued. Invalidation requires evaluating whether prior art evidence can invalidate the relevant patent. Regardless of whether the patent can be invalidated or not, an ownership dispute can potentially transfer 100 percent of the patent rights to the claimant. In contrast, an invalidation proceeding does not necessarily succeed in invalidating the patent in question. Before filing a lawsuit, DJI could have searched prior art to assess the stability of the relevant patents,” Wang said.
He explained that in an ideal world, a company’s accumulation of core technology patents should be positively correlated with its market performance. For both investors and regulators, he noted, “the quality of a patent portfolio should matter more than its quantity” because that is where real value lies.
Wang added that lawsuits like the DJI-Insta360 dispute are “not uncommon in the day-to-day movement of inventors between companies.” For employers whose inventors leave, he explained, it is worth monitoring any patents filed within one year of employees’ departure or retirement. “This is a rule of ownership explicitly granted by law,” he said, “and it is right for the former employer to assert its claim.”
Conversely, Wang cautioned that companies hiring researchers should be careful when listing as an inventor someone who has been with the company for less than one year. “Unless the technology is unrelated to the researcher’s duties at the previous employer, any patent application filed by the new company runs the risk of being claimed by the former employer,” he said.
Lessons from the past
The Shenzhen court will not assess these arguments in isolation. Two decisions of the Supreme People’s Court, one of which has been designated as a formal guiding case, set out the analytical framework that the panel will almost certainly apply. Together, they illustrate the respective legal exposure of each party.
The closer precedent, and the one DJI’s lawyers are more likely to cite, is Shenzhen Weibond Technology v. Li Jianyi (2019). Li, a former Weibond employee, filed a patent for a medical dispensing device just three months after leaving the company, then transferred it to a separate entity, of which he had long been the legal representative and majority shareholder. His defence tracked the arguments Insta360 is now making – he claimed independent development from publicly available materials, denied meaningful involvement in Weibond’s R&D, and produced a technical comparison to distinguish his patent from his former employer’s earlier filings. The Shenzhen Intermediate Court ruled against him, the Guangdong High Court affirmed, and the Supreme People’s Court dismissed his retrial application.
What decided the case was not the job title but documentary proximity to the work. Although Li held a production and manufacturing role rather than an R&D position, Weibond produced his signature on technical drawings, procurement forms for R&D, and records of his participation in engineering discussions. That paper trail was, in the courts’ assessment, sufficient. The Supreme People’s Court formalized this reasoning into a four-factor test now treated as a guiding doctrine: the specific contents of the employee’s duties; the relationship between the disputed patent and those duties; whether the former employer conducted relevant R&D; and whether the patent holder can offer a credible account of independent development. Each of those four factors is squarely in dispute here.
The structural parallel to the DJI case is worth noting. Li transferred his patent to a related entity he controlled, a move courts treated as circumstantially significant. The gap between Insta360’s domestic filings, which withheld inventor names, and its PCT applications, which disclosed them in full, may carry similar weight: not as evidence of wrongdoing, but as a fact that invites explanation and that a court is unlikely to set aside.
The second case cuts the other way. In Zhejiang Chunfeng Power v. Segway (2022) – involving CFMoto, a Chinese vehicle manufacturer – a former CFMoto engineer, whose responsibilities centred on overall vehicle R&D, was sued after filing a patent on air filters at his new employer. The former employer argued that air filter development fell within the same broad technical field as automotive R&D. The court rejected that framing: it was not appropriate, the ruling held, to expand the technical field of a specific automotive component into the broader automotive category. Proximity to a general domain is not enough; the connection must track a specific technical responsibility.
That distinction carries direct implications for Insta360. DJI’s six patents span three distinct domains: flight control algorithms, structural architecture and imaging systems. If the engineers at the centre of the dispute worked primarily in one domain and the patents they filed at Insta360 cover another, the 2022 ruling provides a credible basis for arguing the one-year presumption should not apply. Courts consider multiple factors, including the specific content of the employee’s prior work; the technical relationship between that work and the disputed patent; whether the former employer conducted R&D in the same area; and whether the patent holder can offer a credible account of independent development. Judicial practice, Qin noted, is meant to balance protection of former employers’ legitimate rights against interpretations so broad they would chill the normal movement of R&D talent.
Taken together, the precedents suggest that the outcome will turn less on reasonably settled legal doctrine than on the granularity of the evidentiary record. Not whether these engineers worked in DJI’s drone division, but what, specifically, they worked on, and how precisely the disputed patents track that specific work. Internal emails, laboratory notebooks, design review records and system access logs will matter more than either side’s public statements.
Yan said intellectual property protection has become a major area of competition among Chinese companies as state enforcement efforts intensify.
Citing the Huawei-Xiaomi dispute as an example, Yan noted that in September 2023, the two companies announced a global patent cross-licensing agreement. Both issued similar statements saying they had been actively negotiating patent licenses and that China’s IP protection system offers diverse resolution mechanisms, including administrative and judicial mediation. According to Yan, both Huawei and Xiaomi view mediation as an effective channel to facilitate licensing and believe that IP licensing and cooperation promote innovation and the public interest.
Yan also pointed to the dispute between Hai Robotics and Geek+, two Chinese warehouse robotics companies. In March 2023, a patent infringement dispute between them reached the Intellectual Property Tribunal of the Supreme People’s Court on appeal. According to Yan, the presiding judge noted multiple unresolved disputes between the two companies nationwide, including pending patent infringement lawsuits, related administrative patent invalidation cases and disputes still before the national IP office.
The panel of judges decided on a “mediation‑first, simultaneous hearing and mediation” approach, Yan said. The court drafted preliminary settlement terms for both sides, which included framework clauses to guide future negotiations and cooperation. Both companies accepted the court’s proposal. On the morning of November 15, 2023, they signed a settlement agreement, resolving all 11 active lawsuits in a single package.
Yan said the court was concerned that constant litigation in an emerging industry could squander first-mover advantages and harm both the companies and the broader market.
The competitive market
In public messaging, Insta360 also suggested it could respond more aggressively. According to China Daily, Yue Yuan, head of Insta360’s China operations, said an internal assessment found the disputed technologies could be covered by 28 Insta360 patents, spanning hardware and structural design, software methods, control systems and accessories.
Market-share claims in the panoramic and action-camera space are not consistently reported across firms. One industry report relayed by 36Kr describes sharply different market-share outcomes depending on the research provider, including estimates from Jiqian Consulting and Frost & Sullivan. This underscores that some widely circulated percentages cannot be treated as settled facts without access to underlying datasets.
Separately, China Daily reported that, according to market research firm IDC, DJI and Insta360 ranked first and second globally in the handheld camera market in 2025, with market shares of 62.4 percent and 20.4 percent, respectively. The report also said Insta360 maintained a leading position in the panoramic camera segment, with shipments rising nearly 60 percent year-on-year and market share reaching 66 percent.
Insta360’s publicly reported financial scale also contrasts with DJI’s estimated size. For example, Forbes reported Insta360 posted Rmb5.6 billion (US$819.9 million) in revenue and Rmb994.7 million (US$146.3 million) in profit, citing prospectus disclosures tied to its 2025 listing.
DJI’s revenue is not publicly reported because DJI is privately held.
Why market leaders sue
Litigation can reshape the competitive dimension by shifting the focus from price to technology and compliance, raising rivals’ R&D and compliance costs through patent barriers. It can also disrupt financing, listings or product launches by injecting uncertainty into a competitor’s operations. Beyond the courtroom, such lawsuits may influence suppliers, distributors and other supply chain partners to act more cautiously. In sectors with overlapping technologies, litigation can also become a pathway toward cross-licensing, technical cooperation or broader commercial settlements.
Yan noted that in head-to-head competition among industry leaders, patent litigation is not merely a legal tool for rights protection; it is an extension of competitive strategy, functioning across dimensions such as controlling market tempo, managing supply chain relationships and increasing leverage in business negotiations.
Turning to how Chinese courts handle such disputes, Yan said that while they take the market background into consideration, they adhere to a prudent principle of “legal judgment first, market factors second.” A court will consider the parties’ market positions to understand the context, but at the core of its ruling, it focuses strictly on technical claim construction, patent validity and element-by-element infringement analysis. The court will not be swayed by “who is number one in the market.” Instead, it strives to strike a balance between rigorous protection of technological innovation and maintaining a fair competition order.
On one hand, Yan observed, courts remain vigilant against “batch litigation” lacking a substantive rights basis or malicious pressure tactics, curbing improper lawsuits. On the other hand, while recognizing the exclusive nature of patent rights, if the case involves standard‑essential patents or a refusal to license, courts may introduce competition law perspectives to prevent the exercise of patent rights from morphing into market monopolization.
