A patent infringement lawsuit filed by an individual against the bike-sharing company Mobike started yesterday at Shanghai Intellectual Property Court.

The plaintiff surnamed Hu claimed he had designed a system allowing motorbike owners to unlock their bikes without a key so as to reduce the risk of theft.

Hu said that under his design each user would be given an exclusive QR code that they needed to store on their mobile phone. They are required to have the code scanned by a micro-camera installed on their bike. They could use their bike if the code matched; otherwise, an alarm would be triggered.

He added he had sent his QR recognition technology to the State Intellectual Property Office in 2013 and was granted a patent in May last year, as confirmed by the website of the office.

In court, Hu claimed Mobike bikes were operating under his technology and his patent was infringed.

He has demanded that Mobike stop using the current lock system as it is his invention, not Mobike’s, and he is seeking 500,000 yuan (US$74,715) in compensation.

Mobike denied the charge, saying its technology is based on the verification of the users’ personal information and backed by big data — a term for data sets that are so large or complex that traditional data processing application software is inadequate to deal with them.

Mobike was set up in 2015 and made its debut in Shanghai last year.

The court didn’t issue a verdict yesterday.