In response to invalidation requests, on March 6, 2023, the CNIPA declared all three of Vero’s raised floor supporting structure related patents invalid in whole. As the invalidation petitioner’s entrusted agency, CHISPO ATTORNEYS AT LAW provided legal services during the invalidation process.

Challenges

With regards to the three patents in question, we found dozens of relevant reference documents which disclose technical solutions recited in the independent and most of the dependent claims. Although technical features in some dependent claims are not disclosed in the Descriptions of the reference documents, they are presented in the attached drawings. That is to say, the relevant structures and their technical effects are merely disclosed in the drawings of the reference documents but are not explained in detail in the text of the Description.

In view of this, the patentee incorporated the additional technical features of the relevant dependent claim into the independent claim, forming a new independent claim, and stated that the drawings of the reference document were only schematic, and that the Description did not disclose the relevant technical features, let alone the technical effects thereof. The petitioner’s so-called "easily conceivable" statement was actually "foresight" made under the technical enlightenment of the disputed patents.

Highlights

We were not convinced by the patentee's statements, and we believed that the person skilled in the art should not only be able to get the literal meaning of the prior art, but also be able to understand in depth the implied technical information when reading the prior art documents. The technical solution and the corresponding technical effects are considered obvious if a person skilled in the art can, based on what is disclosed in the prior art, deduce the technical solution through logical analysis and reasoning.

In these cases, one should interpret the technical solution of the reference documents from the perspective of the person skilled in the art. The person skilled in the art can uniquely determine that the relevant structure disclosed in the drawings really exists based on in-depth understanding of the technical solution disclosed in the reference documents and can deduce the corresponding technical effect of the relevant structure through logical analysis and reasoning, which can prove that the technical solution of the patent does not possess substantive features. The patentee recorded the structure depicted in the drawings of the reference documents in text form to obtain the so-called “new” technical solution, which violates the public interest and destroys the market’s fair competition environment.

In the end, the panel agreed with our arguments and declared all three raised floor supporting structure related patents invalid in whole, which safeguarded our client’s interests.

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