Recently, a patent invalidation case represented by Beijing Lisheng Intellectual Property Agency Co., Ltd. has been concluded. The State Intellectual Property Office made Invalidity Decision No. 563705, declaring the invention patent with application number 201611222346.1, entitled "A Preparation Method of High Wear-Resistant and Impact-Resistant Roller Liner and Squeeze Roller", completely invalid.
The case was complex, involving multiple patent infringement lawsuits, and had been subject to invalidation requests up to 6 times. Our company accepted the client's entrustment in July 2022, and it took one and a half years from filing the invalidation request to issuing the invalidation conclusion, finally helping the client achieve the expected result.
Case Introduction
The involved patent belongs to the technical field of squeeze rollers for building materials and is a method-based invention patent. The inventive concept of the patent lies in the clever combination of two conventional processing techniques, "insert casting" and "surfacing welding", which makes up for the deficiency of using only a single processing technique in the market. The claims are protected in the form of process steps, and their technical features are limited by many modifiers, such as "high wear resistance and impact resistance", "good toughness and weldability", etc.
To enhance the persuasiveness of the evidence, after comprehensive research and judgment, our company focused the technical field of the evidence on the technical field of squeeze rollers for building materials, using patent evidence to prove the main technical means and book evidence to prove the modifier-type technical features. Finally, two foreign-language evidences with the closest inventive concepts and technical routes were selected as the closest prior art, forming two sets of invalidation reasons. Among them, although Evidence 3 (US5269477A) fully disclosed the product structure of this case in terms of structure, considering that this case is a method-based claim with strict sequence between steps, and based on technical inspiration, we supplemented and combined Evidence 1 and multiple book evidences to achieve sufficient evidence submission and full reasoning.
Key Points of Judgment
If a claim has distinguishing technical features from the prior art, but such distinguishing technical features are obvious to a person skilled in the art on the basis of another prior art, and the effect achievable after combination can be clearly anticipated, then the technical solution claimed by the claim does not meet the essential requirements for obtaining inventiveness.
