When determining inventiveness, if there is a coordination relationship between the technical features in the claimed technical scheme that is distinguishing from the closest prior art and other technical features, and the distinguishing technical features produce the technical effects and solve technical problems based on technical effects produced by other technical features, but the corresponding technical features in the closest prior art cannot produce the same technical effect based on its invention purpose and invention conception, the personnel skilled in the art usually would not have the motivation to improve the prior art, and so the claimed technical scheme is not obvious to those skilled in the art.
Zhenjiang A Company is the patentee of the utility model patent for a heat dissipation substrate and a sealed PTC thermistor heater (the disputed patent). On January 3, 2020, the natural person X filed an invalidation request against the disputed patent. The CNIPA made the examination decision on the invalidation request on July 9, 2020, holding that claim 1 in the disputed patent possesses inventiveness and the disputed patent is maintained. X was dissatisfied and filed a lawsuit in the first-instance court, requesting the court to revoke the challenged decision and order the CNIPA to make a decision anew.
The first-instance court held that based on evidence 1 and their knowledge and capability in the art, those skilled in the art could obtain Claim 1 in the disputed patent without inventive work. Claim 1 in the disputed patent does not possess inventiveness. Therefore, the court made a first-instance administrative judgment as follows: 1) the challenged examination decision on invalidation request made by the CNIPA is revoked; and 2) the CNIPA is requested to make an examination decision on invalidation request anew. Zhenjiang A Company filed an appeal. The Supreme People’s Court made a final administrative judgment as follows: 1) the first-instance administrative judgment is revoked, and 2) X’s lawsuit claims are rejected.
The effective judgment of the Court held that if there is a coordination relationship between the distinguishing technical features and other technical features, and the technical effects produced by the distinguishing technical features and technical problems solved are based on the technical effects produced by other technical features, but the corresponding technical features in the closest prior art cannot produce the same technical effect based on its invention purpose and invention conception, the personnel skilled in the art would not have the motivation to improve the prior art, the claimed technical scheme is not obvious to those skilled in the art.
The technical feature in claim 1 in the disputed patent distinguishing from evidence 1 is that “outer walls on the left and right sides of the cavity are the groove-shaped structures extending along the length direction of the cavity”. According to the description of the disputed patent, the inner surfaces on both sides of the accommodating cavity between the positioning ribs are outwardly protruding curved surfaces, and when the cavity is pressed, the side walls of the cavity are deformed outwardly under force, and the groove-shaped structure provides deformation space. Therefore, the technical effect brought by the groove-shaped structure to the disputed patent is closely related to the spatial requirement of the outward deformation of the cavity sidewall generated by the aforementioned outwardly protruding curved surfaces. Accordingly, the technical problem actually solved by claim 1 in the disputed patent over evidence 1 is to provide the outward deformation space when the cavity is pressed. However, according to the description of evidence 1, the technical problem to be solved by evidence 1 is the uneven force on the aluminum tube in the width direction when pressing the aluminum tube, due to the overlarge position space of the overall PTC heating core in the aluminum tube, which may cause the PTC heating core to not be in the middle position in the width direction when pressing the aluminum tube. To maintain PTC heating core in the middle of the aluminum tube in the width direction, positioning bars are provided on the sidewalls in evidence 1 to limit the movable space of PTC heating core in the width direction of the aluminum tube.
If the sidewalls in evidence 1 overall are outwardly protruding during pressing, the positioning bars will definitely move outside, which enlarges the distance between the positioning bars and the PTC heating core, as well as the movable space of the PTC heating core in the aluminum tube. This will make it hard to keep the PTC heating core in the middle of the aluminum tube in the width direction, which is against the invention purpose of evidence 1. Considering that the outer surface of evidence 1 is an inwardly concave curved structure, although the inner surface of the cavity between the positioning bars is an outwardly protruding curved surface, it will not produce the technical effect of outward deformation after the sidewall of the cavity is subject to force, and therefore, there wouldn’t be the problem that accommodation space is needed after the sidewall is deformed outwardly. The personnel skilled in the art wouldn’t have the motivation to make an improvement based on evidence 1 by arranging groove-shaped structures on both sides of the outer wall to provide accommodation space for outward deformation. The prior art neither discloses the groove-shaped structure in claim 1 of the disputed patent, nor does it provide a technical teaching, and there is no evidence proving that providing a groove-shaped structure on the outer wall of the cavity is a technical means easily conceived by those skilled in the art. In conclusion, the prior art does not provide a teaching to apply the distinguishing features to evidence 1 to solve its existing technical problem.
(2021) Zui Gao Fa Zhi Xing Zhong No. 1226
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