The Application Of Prior Art Defense In Patent Infringement Case

According to the recent statistics, patent infringement cases increased year by year. In the actual business life, the person trying to use the other people's protected technologies without the owner's authority is always cunning, so they may change the related technological feature to avoid patent infringement litigation. Faced with the reality of widespread infringement, the judge always expanded the technical feature to its equivalents so that the act stealing other people's patented technologies can be convicted as infringement, and this is so-called doctrine of equivalent. The doctrine of equivalent is playing an important role in determination of patent infringement, and exploring its accredited standard actively is an important task of patent experts in all over the world. Thus there is no doubt that profound grasp of the standard of the doctrine of equivalent in judicial practice can promote the determination of patent infringement. Faced with the patent infringement litigation, the alleged infringer who is not helpless can defense it with prior art to deny the establishment of infringement. Before the Patent Law is revised in 2008, it didn't directly provide for the infringer prior art defense, however, it can be derived from the Civil Law and other provisions of the Patent Law in accordance with actual needs of normal operation of patent system to safeguard public legitimate interests and more reasonable patent system. On one hand, prior art defense played an important role in our patent system which is emphasized by judicial and administrative department year by year. On the other hand ,although newly-revised Patent Law has regulated prior art defense, there are different opinion on the application scope and standard of prior art defense which wasn't regulated in the new law. So the research on the subject about prior art defense can promote legislature and judiciary.This paper consists of five parts such as follows: Preface, Basic description of the case ,Focus on the controversy of the case, Debate on the focus of the case, and the Research conclusion. In the first part we will give a whole introduction about this paper in order to obtain a general realization. In the second part we will describe the whole case in detail, including the plaintiff's and defendant's alleged viewpoint and the judge's conviction. In the third part we summarize two focus on this case: whether the defendant's prior art defense is legal; whether the technical feature of the defendant's product is equivalent to the technical feature of the patented product. In the fourth part we will discuss the main opinion on the accredited standard of prior art defense and doctrine of equivalent in our country. In the last part we will get the research conclusion about the determination of prior art, the application scope and the accredited standard of prior art defense and the doctrine of equivalent according to the main opinion above. At last, we reexamine the case in accordance with the research conclusion and get our own viewpoint, and meanwhile we give some related suggestion on legislature and judiciary.