China Patent

How Smart is a "Skilled Person in the Art"?

11 April 2022

Let’s start with a riddle: can you name a person who has read every book, every journal, conducted every known experiment, and is knowledgeable about every single patent prosecution / litigation in the world? The answer? A “skilled person in the art.” This person is also known as a “person having ordinary skill in the […]

Patent Eligibility for Software in China

4 April 2022

Technology has progressed significantly since the early days of patent law, when US lawmakers in 1952 could only envision patentable subject matter into categories like “process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter.” The recent explosion of new types of innovations that don’t fall neatly into these categories has resulted in a game of catch-up, where […]

China Joins Two WIPO Treaties, the Hague System and the Marrakesh Treaty

11 February 2022

It has been two challenging years, yet there are many reasons to still have hope. We wish you a blessed Lunar New Year as we welcome the year of the Tiger. We wanted to highlight a few new developments in China. China has joined the Hague System for the International Registration of Industrial Designs, submitting […]

CHINA DIVISIONAL PATENT STRATEGY: Recent Judgment Narrows What Constitutes “Different Inventions” for Divisionals

6 December 2021

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 […]

How Far Can an Employer Reach to Own Employee-made “Service Inventions”?

30 July 2020

2019 China’s Top 50 Representative IP Cases Shenzhen Weibang Technology Co. Ltd v. Li Jianyi & Shenzhen Yuancheng Intelligence Equipment Co. Ltd (2019最高法民申6342号) Each year in China there are hundreds of disputes over patent ownership. A significant part of them are related to “Service Inventions”, which are defined in Article 6 of the Chinese Patent […]