Poaching talent doesn't equal innovation; protecting intellectual property is the true solution to "anti-involution."

Byline / Chao Tide (media professional) Editor / He Rui Proofreader / Wang Xin

▲ The occurrence of a patent infringement lawsuit also means that China’s drone industry development has entered a mature stage. Photo/IC photo

On March 23, Shenzhen DJI Innovation Technology Co., Ltd. formally filed a lawsuit with the Intermediate People’s Court of Shenzhen City, Guangdong Province, against Zhishidian Innovation Technology Co., Ltd., involving six patent ownership disputes. Several of DJI’s core R&D personnel have been accused of participating. At present, the court has officially accepted the case.

This is also the first patent ownership lawsuit in China’s domestic drone industry. The news quickly drew market attention, and many domestic and international media outlets reported on it.

In terms of nature, this patent lawsuit is not a major case, yet it has attracted a large amount of attention. The main reason is that it happened between two well-known Chinese imaging companies—actually, these are also two globally renowned imaging powerhouses. DJI’s main business is drones, while Zhishidian’s main business is action cameras, but this dispute arose in the consumer imaging sector where their businesses overlap.

In 2025, these two companies, which were rapidly expanding, entered each other’s main battlegrounds one after another and triggered a price war, which in turn led to this patent ownership dispute—the first of its kind—initiated by DJI in China.

In other words, the bigger backdrop of this case is an escalation in market competition between the two. Competition has moved from product upgrades to patents, and it also involves issues such as organized poaching of talent, touching some gray areas of industry competition and legal dispute zones—these factors have increased attention to the case, with plenty of room for discussion.

Organized poaching of talent sparks concerns about “involution”

Patent ownership disputes in fields where companies jointly get involved are very common. But the difference in DJI’s case is that nearly all coverage mentions one point: the patents may have been completed by former DJI core R&D personnel who left the company not long ago.

DJI states publicly that all of the inventors of the six patents involved previously worked in DJI’s R&D department and directly participated in technical development in areas such as drone flight control, structural design, and image processing.

According to the Implementing Rules of the Patent Law of the People’s Republic of China, for inventions and creations made within one year after an employee leaves, and that are related to the employee’s original duties, the patent rights belong to the original unit. This provision is commonly referred to in the industry as the “one-year rule.”

Zhishidian, meanwhile, said in an announcement that although the relevant employees in question all joined the company within one year after leaving DJI, “the patent applications submitted by those employees as inventors during that period, according to the existing evidence, are all independent innovative成果 generated during their employment at the company,” and that the R&D process is lawful and compliant.

Since the case is still under trial, it is hard for outsiders to determine right or wrong. But from an industry perspective, the fact that this case has occurred in itself can be said to be a sign that the consumer imaging sector—a sector that once was a late starter—has entered a period of market maturity. Because in emerging markets, all companies are busy racing to capture market share, and their businesses overlap less with one another, making conflicts difficult to arise in the short term.

And a “patent lawsuit” means overlapping spheres of business, the basic stability of technical routes, innovation beginning to show “micro-innovation” characteristics, and competition shifting toward efforts to breach patent barriers and ecosystem barriers.

When an industry starts to see a large number of patent lawsuits, it means it has entered a mature stage. For example, after the phone industry became mature, lawsuits occurred between Apple and Samsung, as well as between Qualcomm and nearly the entire industry.

It is clear that the consumer imaging industry is also entering a phase of intensive patent-based competition. But what is different from the past is that this is not happening in the process of late-developing Chinese companies challenging international giants. Instead, it is a contest among leading Chinese companies themselves.

On the one hand, this reflects that China’s tech industry is moving from the stage of follower-chasing into a stage where internal competition determines the overall landscape. On the other hand, it also easily triggers concerns from outside that unnecessary “involution” among Chinese tech enterprises may occur.

Obviously, if in the future all excellent Chinese tech companies put their energy into price wars, poaching one another, and squandering resources on litigation, it will inevitably affect the industry’s innovation capacity, allowing foreign competitors to reap the benefits as the fishermen.

Industry development must not take “poaching = innovation” for granted

This case has also drawn the attention of some overseas media. Because the core of this lawsuit is actually very “Silicon Valley”—that is, how should we view technology spillover caused by the movement of talent? Does technology belong to the company, or to the “people”? Should we protect company innovation, or protect the movement of talent?

This kind of narrative is common in Silicon Valley, and it has also produced cases that are considered textbook-level—for example, Google Waymo v. Uber.

A key member of Google’s autonomous driving team, Waymo, left and founded Otto. Otto was then acquired by Uber. Google later sued, claiming that trade secrets were misappropriated into Uber’s autonomous driving project, seeking damages and an injunction to prevent Uber from using the related technology.

The case had far-reaching impact. It was called the “first global autonomous-driving intellectual property case.” Ultimately, it was resolved with Uber paying about $245 million in equity compensation and pledging not to use the disputed technology. The individuals involved were also criminally prosecuted and were ultimately sentenced to 18 months in prison for stealing trade secrets.

Why the Google case is considered typical is because it clearly draws three lines: when employees leave and switch jobs, they may take knowledge and experience, but the specific technology roadmap and implementation details must stay with the original company. As for trade secrets, they are absolutely forbidden.

In this DJI case, there are former DJI personnel on the Zhishidian team. Whether only knowledge and experience were taken still needs to be determined by the court. In fact, such cases are not easy to judge, because there are many gray areas—such as how to define “experience” and “trade secrets”—and these test the wisdom of judicial practice.

For the industry, it does not really matter who ultimately wins or loses between DJI and Zhishidian, because in market competition it is normal for companies to offend and conflict with each other. What truly needs to be guarded against is that kind of organized talent poaching—obtaining core technologies through poaching, and even applying for patents.

After all, if an industry assumes “poaching = innovation,” then no one would be willing to invest ten years honing a sword in R&D, and would only end up with a double loss of “involution-style” competition in the red sea of the market.

In fact, domestic courts have also had precedents in this regard, such as the intellectual property dispute case of Geely v. WM Motor.

On June 14, 2024, the Intellectual Property Trial Division of the Supreme People’s Court issued the final judgment in that case. The court ordered the infringer to compensate for economic losses and reasonable expenses for rights protection totaling about RMB 640 million, setting a historic record high for the amount of compensation in IP infringement lawsuits in China.

The cause of the case was that 40 executives and technical personnel under Geely’s automotive unit successively “jumped ship” to WM Motor. In the absence of any technical accumulation or legitimate technology sources, WM Motor used Geely’s chassis component drawings and technical know-how to roll out an electric vehicle of a certain model series in the short term, causing Geely massive losses.

And before and after the case occurred, it was also precisely during the period when competition in China’s electric vehicle industry had heated up to a boiling point and profits had plummeted. For example, Geely’s share price had previously reached as high as 35 yuan, but at the time of the judgment it was only 9 yuan, while WM Motor fell into bankruptcy reorganization. When companies poach each other in such an “involution-style” manner, the negative effects on both sides cannot be ignored.

Returning to the DJI v. Zhishidian case, as two Chinese imaging champions that are also moving toward the international arena, both have faced lawsuits with international competitors during their global expansion, but that has not affected their development and growth. From this perspective, patent-based litigation is not truly something to be afraid of. What needs attention is the “involution-style” competitive trend behind it.

In international competition, many Chinese companies rely on strong competition advantages with Chinese characteristics and therefore do not fear their rivals. But once the competition switches to among Chinese companies, because they understand each other too well and are too similar, it becomes easy to pull out some more low-level tactics outside the rules, thereby forming “involution.”

To address this issue, it is necessary to make good use of the key of the rule of law—to break enterprises’ “involution-style” competition, maintain order in industry development, and also contribute to the construction of a nationwide unified large market.

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责任编辑：刘万里 SF014