Managing global pharmaceutical or chemical portfolios requires navigating China’s notoriously rigid standards on the “same subject matter” requirement for priority and claim amendments. A recent invalidation decision (No. 588094) issued by the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) concerning a pharmaceutical patent provides clarity on how numerical ranges and later added experimental data are evaluated in priority claims. More specifically, how much literal support is needed for a claim directed towards a “new” numerical sub-range supported by later added working examples? The Core Dispute: Priority Over specific Ratios and “Added” Data The patent at issue protected a pharmaceutical composition comprising Edaravone (3-methyl-1-phenyl-2-pyrazolin-5-one) and natural borneol (for treating cerebrovascular diseases), specifically…
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- China, China Patent Office, CNIPA, Court Cases, Courts, Invalidation, Inventiveness, Patent, Supreme People's Court, Top 10 IP Case
No More Hindsight Bias: China’s Supreme People’s Court Reins in Patent Inventiveness Assessments
For foreign applicants navigating patent litigation or invalidation in China, a common frustration is hindsight bias. Too often, CNIPA or lower courts strip down a patent into isolated technical features, find those features across disparate prior art references, and declare the invention to be “obvious”. To counter such hindsight reasoning, the core criterion has always been whether a person skilled in the art would readily conceive of such technical solution. In practice, that standard has not been applied consistently. Examiners and judges are often tempted to rely on their own intuitive standard, or worse-yet, directly use hindsight reasoning, undermining the consistency and predictability of the inventive-step analysis. A relatively recent…
- AI, China, China Patent Office, CNIPA, Inventions, Inventiveness, Patent, Patent Re-examination and Invalidation Department, Patent Re-examination Board, Top 10 IP Case
From Faces to Football Fields: How Applying AI Models to Different Application Fields Can Prove Inventive in China
As AI models become versatile and adaptable across multiple contexts and industries, questions about inventive step sit at the heart of patent examination in China. The 2023 Patent Examination Guidelines (hereinafter referred to as ‘the Guidelines’) included several sessions dedicated to explaining how inventive step should be examined for AI-related inventions, featuring examples related to AI algorithms, big data, and user experience1. In the re-examination of Beijing ByteDance Network Technology Co. Ltd.’s application entitled “Method and apparatus for processing an image” (Application No. 201810734681.2)2, which was recognized as one of the Top 10 Re-examination Cases of 2025 by the CNIPA, the CNIPA focused on the following issue: when an existing…
