*AI-generated translation, for reference only.

Recently, the Intellectual Property Court of the Supreme People's Court concluded three administrative cases concerning the invalidation of invention patents, involving appellant Ya [REDACTED] Company, appellee the China National Intellectual Property Administration, and first-instance third parties Sai [REDACTED] Company, Wang [REDACTED] ni, and Wang [REDACTED] jun (hereinafter Sai [REDACTED] Company, Wang [REDACTED] ni, and Wang [REDACTED] jun are collectively referred to as the third parties; among them, Wang [REDACTED] ni and Wang [REDACTED] jun are biological siblings, and Wang [REDACTED], the legal representative of Sai [REDACTED] Company, is the wife of Wang [REDACTED] jun).

In these three cases, the patents-in-suit were both titled "Method and Apparatus for Cross-Layer Optimization in Multimedia Communication with Different User Terminals," and the third parties are the co-owners of the patents-in-suit. Ya [REDACTED] Company filed a request with the China National Intellectual Property Administration to declare the patents-in-suit invalid, primarily on the grounds that the patents-in-suit lacked inventiveness.

The China National Intellectual Property Administration decided to maintain the validity of the patents-in-suit. After Ya [REDACTED] Company filed lawsuits against each decision, the first-instance court rendered judgments rejecting its claims and upholding the challenged decisions. Ya [REDACTED] Company then appealed all three cases to the Supreme People's Court.

The substantive dispute in the adjudication of these three cases primarily concerned the determination of inventiveness of the communication technical solutions related to Internet of Things technology. In this regard, the Supreme People's Court held that: In the current field of communications, technological development typically revolves around three levels: connection breadth, connection depth, and connection quality. For a technical solution that merely proposes a combination of multiple scenarios or functions and achieves such combination by superimposing and reorganizing existing technical means, when assessing whether it possesses inventiveness, the key determination should focus on whether there is a technical teaching for the combination of multiple scenarios, whether new technical means are introduced or new technical problems are solved, and whether the achieved effect exceeds the sum of the individual effects of each scenario, or produces unexpected technical effects.

If the disputed technical solution merely superimposes or reorganizes existing technical means in a simple manner through permutation and combination, endows hardware devices with individual or integrated conventional communication functions through conventional network configuration methods and conventional means such as signal transmission/reception, reading, and processing, thereby achieving a broader communication range or more communication functions, without introducing new technical means or solving new technical problems, and the roles it plays in the prior art and in the disputed patent are not substantially different, and overall, it does not produce unexpected technical effects, then it should not be deemed to possess inventiveness.

Based on the content disclosed in the relevant prior art evidence in the three cases, combined with the general knowledge level of a person skilled in the art, the distinguishing features of the disputed claims of the patents-in-suit over the closest prior art were either disclosed by other prior art evidence or belonged to conventional technical means in the art. Furthermore, a person skilled in the art could obtain a technical teaching to apply these distinguishing features to the closest prior art, and the technical effects thereof were also reasonably foreseeable by a person skilled in the art. Therefore, the disputed claims of the patents-in-suit all lacked inventiveness, and Ya [REDACTED] Company's grounds for appeal were established.

In the second-instance trials of these three cases, the Supreme People's Court strictly adhered to the legal standards for assessing inventiveness in granting invention patents, carefully considered the contribution of the patented technology against the backdrop of the existing state of the art, and delineated the boundary between "combinatorial innovation" and "simple superimposition or reorganization of existing technical means." Through the adjudication of individual cases, it conveyed the judicial orientation of ensuring that "genuine innovation" receives "genuine protection," which is conducive to promoting orderly innovation and development of inventions and creations in related fields.