In China, patents applicants take advantage of a commonly-used divisional filing strategy to achieve a fine-tuned balance between protection scope and protection period (if used properly). Patent applicants (especially foreign applicants) widely welcome this well-established strategy, and up until now, have used it with much success. In fact, we recommend this strategy and have even written about this China divisional patent strategy. However, a recent judgment decision has called this strategy into question. We share more about this interesting case below. Case Background A company in Zhejiang Province (JC Company) filed a divisional application with claims having a different scope of protection from its utility model “parent” (which was about…
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CHINA: How Prohibiting “Illegal” Inventions Runs into Food Safety Law
Chinese Patent Law has an interesting provision that specifically prohibits patent protection on “illegal” or “immoral” inventions. What does this mean, exactly? According to Article 5.1 of the Chinese Patent Law, “no patent shall be granted for an invention that contravenes any law or social moral or that is detrimental to public interests.” On its face, this provision seems extremely broad, undefined, and potentially very subjective. Whose moral standard? And how do you define “detrimental”? Because details of litigations are not always publicly available in China, we only have limited examples by which we can understand how Chinese courts and examiners interpret and apply this language. Below we highlight one…
- China, Court Cases, Courts, EIP Coffee Break, EIP Patent 101 Corner, prosecution, Supreme People's Court
Do Invention and UM Patents Filed on the Same Day Rise and Fall Together?
Snippets of Court Cases, Provisions, and Key Observations about China’s IP Landscape Seminal Cases by the SPC Recently, the Intellectual Property Division of the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) issued a list of seminal (精品) cases. Although China is not a case law country, such seminal cases issued by the SPC have high guiding impact for similar cases in the future, so they are still worthy of attention. One of the seminal cases ((2020) 最高法知民终699号) is very interesting. It involves a set of “same day applications”, i.e. an invention patent and utility model (UM) patent directed towards the same invention filed on the same day. The key issue is: if the…
