Recently, the Intellectual Property Tribunal of the Supreme People's Court of China released the "Abbreviature of Adjudication (2020) of the Intellectual Property Tribunal of the Supreme People's Court of China". The Intellectual Property Tribunal of Supreme Court selected 55 typical cases from 2,787 technical intellectual property cases concluded in 2020 and refined into 46 judicial rules, which reflects the judicial theory, trial ideas and judgment methods of the Intellectual Property Tribunal of the Supreme Court on handling difficult, complex and new types of cases in the field of technical intellectual property trials, and has great guiding significance. The case represented by intellectual property lawyers and patent attorneys Bo WANG and Feng XU of Panawell was selected as Case No. 23 — (2020) ZuiGaoFaZhiXingZhong No. 183, administrative dispute over the invalidation of a utility model patent between the appellant SHENZHEN DAJIANG LINGMOU TECHNOLOGY, CO., LTD. and the appellee THE CHINA NATIONAL INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ADMINISTRATION, and the third party of the original trial Wenwen DU.

In the case of invalidation of the utility model patent, on behalf of the petitioner Wenwen DU, Panawell successfully requested the CNIPA to make a decision on partial invalidation of the patent right. In the subsequent patent administrative litigation stage initiated by the patentee, Beijing Intellectual Property Court and the Intellectual Property Tribunal of Supreme Court both upheld the invalidation decision made by the CNIPA.

The Court held that the typical significance of this case mainly lies in that the inventive step of the technical solution of the patent can be derived from "problem solving" and also can be from "problem raising" under certain circumstances. After synthesizing the whole case, the court held that the evidence was insufficient to support the patentee’s claims that this patent solves technical problems not noticed in the prior art; and approved the views of the petitioner that it is a conventional innovative way to use publicly known technology to improve similar objects in the same way, which is not enough to bring inventive step.

So far, on behalf of the client, Panawell has won the overall victory in the administrative litigation stage.