Recently, Beijing Unitalen Law Office, representing a Chinese charging network ecology unicorn company (hereinafter referred to as "the client"), successfully invalidated all claims of the other party's patent right for invention in the patent invalidation announcement procedure. This protected the client's commercial interests, safeguarded its market operation and promotion, and swept away the haze.

Case Brief

In September 2023, Unitalen Law Office accepted a request for invalidation announcement of a patent for invention commissioned by a client. The patent involved is an invention patent under No. ZL202110131805.X entitled "New Energy Parking Space Determination Method and Device." This patent has seven claims in total, including three independent claims. The patent was filed on January 30, 2021, and was granted a patent right on April 22, 2022. The technical solution claimed in the patent relates to methods and devices for matching parking information of new energy vehicles with charging stations and charging parking spaces.

Case Analysis

On September 12, 2023, Unitalen, representing the client, filed a request for invalidation announcement against the patent right involved with the CNIPA, clearly pointing out the reasons and evidence for invalidation announcement of the patent right involved because it does not meet the requirements for being granted a patent right due to lack of an inventive step relative to the prior art.

Upon careful review of the application documents, authorization documents, and examination history documents in the authorization process of the patent involved, the team at Unitalen determined the core inventive point of the patent involved as follows: "A target parking space for the vehicle is determined by acquiring vehicle information, charging demand information, parking space available time period information of all charging station parking spaces in the parking lot, all charging station parking spaces including parking spaces of fixed owners willing to share their parking spaces, available time periods for comprehensive parking spaces and charging time periods of charging demands." As a result, the team at Unitalen determined search strategies for invalidation based on the background of the patent involved, quickly and efficiently carried out search work, and searched for previously disclosed patent literature and relevant common knowledge evidence.

In combination with the analysis of evidence from the prior art, the team at Unitalen believes that the features "obtaining available time period information for all parking spaces, wherein all parking spaces include parking spaces of fixed owners and the charging time period of the charging demand is matched with the parking space available time period when the target parking space is determined" in the technical solution of the independent claim. The parts relating to the matching method in the dependent claims of the patent involved are the difficulties and focus of this invalidation.

In response to the key issues mentioned above, the team at Unitalen actively collected evidence from multiple sources and formulated comprehensive strategies for invalidation. In terms of evidence collection, on the one hand, nine pieces of published literature relating to the patent involved were collected; on the other hand, the team at Unitalen actively sought and used public evidence to fix evidence through various methods such as on-site notarization, webpage time-stamp for evidence collection, and screen recording function of mobile phone Apps for evidence collection, to closely form a complete evidence chain.

In terms of strategies for invalidation, the team at Unitalen proposed that the core technical solution has been disclosed by the closest reference document; the distinguishing feature from the closest reference document is "specific means for convenient sharing and efficiency improvement during shared charging"; the relevant distinguishing feature has been disclosed by other reference documents, and the relevant technical feature includes "utilization of the sharing time period of a charging pile," "time requirement," and "implementation in communication binding using QR codes, mobile phones, etc.", and the like, which are also technologies and situations well-known in the industry; and the team at Unitalen provided different combination methods of relevant reference documents to disclose these distinguishing technical features.

Based on the detailed combination of evidence and full discussion from multiple perspectives, the CNIPA finally adopted the Unitalen team's proposition and deemed that it is easy to envisage the claims relative to the combination of the prior art and common knowledge. Therefore, the CNIPA issued No. 565823 Decision on Examination of Request for Invalidation Announcement on January 12, 2024, declaring the patent right involved entirely invalid for the reason that the patent involved lacks an inventive step.

Conclusion

In this case, it only took five months from the Unitalen team's receipt of the client's commission to the CNIPA's issuance of a decision on invalidation. The team at Unitalen helps the client solve the dispute efficiently and quickly, safeguards its market operation and promotion while protecting its commercial interests, and sweeps away the haze.