Patent Dispute Over Mobile QR Code Scanning Technology Involving Alipay and Others

With mobile payments becoming a daily habit, scanning QR codes with smartphones is now ubiquitous, and related patent disputes are on the rise.

Recently, the Beijing Intellectual Property Court accepted a case involving the invention patent titled “Method, device, and mobile terminal for communication using barcode images” (referred to as the “in‑question patent”). The plaintiff, X‑Company, filed the patent on April 17, 2012 and received authorization on August 26, 2015.

The plaintiff alleges that Alipay’s global QR‑code scanning service infringes the patent and seeks an injunction, compensation of 6.5 million RMB, and legal costs. The case is still under further review.

Earlier reports indicated that the “scan” patent covers all barcode image formats (1D, 2D, multi‑dimensional) and guarantees user information security. The patent holder claims that worldwide licensing fees have reached 700 million RMB, and that many smartphone manufacturers and app developers have used the technology without authorization.

The plaintiff has already launched domestic enforcement actions, suing a phone manufacturer for infringing the “scan” patent and is planning a global enforcement campaign.

Public reaction is mixed: some label the plaintiff a “patent troll,” while others support the enforcement of intellectual property rights.

Similar disputes have occurred before; at the end of 2019, WeChat Pay faced a lawsuit over its QR‑code payment process, but the court ruled that the technology used in decoding did not fall within the scope of the plaintiff’s patent, dismissing the claim.

The article concludes by noting that the ownership of the “scan” patent remains to be definitively determined by national authorities, but the technology has become a highly valuable commodity in the mobile ecosystem.