Beijing High Court released the Top 10 Intellectual Property Rights Cases of the Year of 2014. The top 10 cases cover a wide range of IP practices. AFD China is glad to report that one of our cases is among the list for proper application of patent law.

The selected case of our firm concerns a patent administrative lawsuit filed by our client against the Patent Reexamination Board (PRB) and a domestic digital technology company, after the PRB rejected our client’s request to declare the patent invalid.

According to the High Court’s review, this case was recognized as to set an exemplary standard to the determination of patentability and protection of telecommunication patent. Particularly, the determination of novelty issue presented in the case has provided a good illustration for the model conduction named “forward comparison”.

Forward comparison, which was used in our case, is to compare and determine if the technical scheme of the prior art has all technical features presented in the technical scheme of the concerned patent. That is, if the prior art falls in the scope of the concerned patent the concerned patent does not possess novelty. On the contrary, reverse comparison is to analyze if the technical scheme of the concerned patent has all technical features presented in the technical scheme of the prior art. That is, if the technical scheme of the prior art has more technical features than the concerned patent does, these technical features are considered to be the distinguished features, which results in the conclusion that the technical scheme of the concerned patent possesses novelty. This method is not correct.

The High Court’s judgment and comment of the case affirmed that forward comparison should reign and be used in novelty determination. It also hoped that by promulgating this case, a unified standard for novelty determination for patent case could be formed and adopted in future practice.