I.Case in brief

This case relates to a patent for a cooled regenerated catalyst circulating method in the field of catalytic cracking, which is mainly used for catalytic cracking of heavy raw materials and catalytic upgrading of gasoline. The patent involved has achieved commercial success in the society and won the national science and technology award after it was published. The title of the patent is: “Method and equipment for circulating cooled regenerated catalyst”. Specifically, it relates to a fluidized catalytic cracking process where hydrocarbon feedstock is caused to contact and react with the catalyst in the riser reactor, the reactant flows into the settler to separate the catalyst from oil and gas, the separated catalyst to be regenerated is stripped in the stripping section and then enters the regenerator for coking regeneration, and thereafter, the regenerated catalyst is returned to the riser reactor for recycling. Claim 1 recites “fluidized media distribution facilities are provided at the lower part, and a catalyst mixing buffer space is provided in the downstream”, and such technical feature is also described in the description accordingly. The key technical dispute in this case focuses on the “mixing buffer space” located “downstream”.
Continue Reading Formulating Invalidation Strategy to Force Patentee to Pick One out of Insufficient Disclosure of Description and Lack of Inventiveness

I.Case in brief

China began to implement exhaust emission standards in 2001, which has gone through five stages and will soon enter in the sixth stage (CHINA VI). The exhaust gas reduction technology used in each stage is different accordingly. The two patents involved in this case protection is a metering pump device being used for exhaust gas purification, and the two involved exhaust gas reduction technologies meet CHINA V emission Standards and will not be adopted by CHINA VI Standard. Once China fully enters the CHNIA VI era in terms of exhaust emission standards, the metering pump devices claimed in the two patents conforming to the CHINA V Standards will be completely obsolete. Therefore, for the Plaintiff (i.e. the Patentee), there is a technical timeliness limitation in the case, i.e., if the Plaintiff cannot win the patent infringement lawsuit before China fully enters the CHINA VI stage, the technologies claimed in the subject patents will be out of date, and the subject patents will also be useless.
Continue Reading Designing Invalidation Strategy to Obtain Technical Feature Interpretation Favorable for Non-infringement Defense in Invalidation Procedure