Beijing No.1 Intermediate People's Court recently issued three judgments supporting Dyson's appeal against three previous decisions of SIPO's Patent Reexamination Board (PRB) that rejected three of Dyson's requests for invalidating certain Chinese design patents.

Dyson Limited is a UK based technology company and the innovator of bladeless fans for which it owns patented technology, utility models and designs. As of date, Dyson has entrusted Liang & Partners to file requests for invalidating more than 100 Chinese designs and utility model patents relating to bladeless fans and has won most of the cases. However, in three cases, the PRB decided to uphold the validity of the involved patents in Decisions No. 17904, No.18956 and No.18958. Lifang's patent litigation team studied the cases and believed that the PRB adopted a wrong criterion in examining the inventiveness of the involved designs and such criterion was inconsistent with that of similar cases. Therefore, acting on behalf of the client, Lifang appealed the PRB decisions with Beijing No.1 Intermediate People's Court. The Court supported our opinions in all three cases and cancelled the corresponding decisions. As these cases all relate to the application of Article 23 of the newly amended Patent Law of the People's Republic of China, they have significant implications in judicial practice.