CPA Successfully Represents Client on Request for Retrial of Patent Administrative Case
Recently, China Patent Agent (H.K.) Ltd. (CPA) successfully represented a Swedish patentee in a patent case involving an invalidation decision, thereby getting a grant of retrial of the case from the Supreme People's Court of China (SPC) for the client.
The claims in entirety of the relevant patent application had been invalidated by the Patent Reexamination Board (PRB) of the State Intellectual Property Office of China (SIPO) on the ground that a technical feature in the preamble of claim 1 lacked support by the description. The invalidation decision was subsequently upheld in the first-instance and second-instance trials.
Dissatisfied with the rulings, the client entrusted CPA to file a request for retrial with SPC. In the written request for retrial, CPA's attorneys drew attention to the different requirements as regards the disclosure in technical contents for the preamble and the characterising portion respectively. They also claimed that those skilled in the art were able to understand the technical feature of the claims by combined reference to the description and drawings, and further pointed to the misinterpretation in previous rulings and invalidation decision of the technical solution of the patent application.
A hearing before SPC was held in August 2013 demanding the presence of the client as the patentee, the invalidation requester, and PRB. In January 2014, an administrative ruling in support of the request for retrial was made. Accordingly, implementation of the previous rulings was ceased, and a retrial of the case to be conducted before Beijing Higher People's Court was granted.
