From January 2015 to July 2018, Shanghai Intellectual Property Court accepted and heard 100 dispute cases over service invention & creation (including 89 dispute cases over patent right ownership, 7 cases involving dispute over the award and remuneration of service invention & creation inventor or designer, 4 cases concerning dispute over right of signature of service invention& creation inventor or designer), among which 79 cases have been concluded, 53 cases have been decided, 23 cases have been withdrawn and 3 cases have been solved through mediation. Among all the cases concerning dispute over patent right ownership judged by the court, the patent rights at issue in 31 cases belonged to the original employer, the patent rights at issue in 7 cases were jointly owned by the original employer and the new employer of the inventor or designer, and the inventions in 11 cases were recognized as non-service inventions by the court. Analytically, such kind of dispute reflects the following problems: firstly, no relevant agreement is made in the contract, or the agreement made is unclear. When the employer enters into labor contract, service contract or technical development contract with the employee, they fail to make specific agreements on the position, duty and task of the employee (especially the ownership of any R&D result achieved by the employee in his/her own work, or the ownership of any invention created by the employee utilizing the material and technical conditions of the employer, or the agreement is unclear); as a result, in the litigation, the employer has difficulty in producing evidence to prove whether the patent at issue is created by the employee in his/her own work or whether the patent is related to the employee’s own work. Secondly, relevant documents during the technology research and development process have not been preserved. Most of the cases of patent right ownership are related to disputes arising out of the ownership of any invention created by an employee within one year after his/her demission. During the trial, the court finds that some employers manage their technical data in disorder, and do not preserve their technical documents; as a result, the obligee cannot provide any proof concerning the technology’s specific invention time, research and development process and project participants of the patent at issue during the litigation. Thirdly, signature by non-inventor or non-designer is quite common. Some employers fail to realize that the right of signature is the fundamental right of inventor and designer, and that the signer should be the inventor or designer who makes substantive contribution to the formation of technology; however in reality, when an employer applies for a patent, it is common that senior executive or person in charge of enterprise rather than the actual inventor or designer is registered or their name is signed during the application. Fourthly, service inventor or designer does not get award or remuneration. According to the regulations of Patent Law and Rules for Implementation of the Patent Law, after patent licensing or transfer, the employer shall give the service inventor or designer relevant award or remuneration. However, some enterprises do not formulate any service inventor awarding system, and fail to give the inventor or designer any award or remuneration, which results in a dispute. Fifthly, mediation of dispute of this type is difficult. Most of the dispute cases involved with service invention & creation are related to disputes over the ownership, signature or remuneration of any invention created by the inventor or designer during his/her term of office incurred after the demission of the inventor or designer. In most cases, the new employer of the inventor or designer is a competitor of his/her original employer; therefore, the parties are not willing to compromise on the dispute, neither wanting to relinquish the patent at issue to the other side nor wanting to jointly own such patent with the other side.