Patent Disclosure System

This paper focuses on the comparison between relevant laws, regulations, guidelines and patent practice of CN, US, EP and JP relating to patent disclosure, especially discusses the differences and their influence, try to give a new overall evaluation of our current Chinese system and to find practicable solutions to major disputes in each section, thereby made suggestions with respect to the amendments of the standard of"sufficient disclosure"and"support"used in the current edition of Patent Guidelines for Examination as well as the Patent Law.This paper is broken into five major sections. The first section introduces the relevant sources of law and their legal requirements and focuses on the differences among them. The second section deals with the disputes among various definitions of"the person skilled in the art", and finds the reasonable perspective by shifting the emphasis to the technical resources possessed by"the skilled in the art"and creating a rule about which prior art can be incorporated into information described in the initial patent application. The third section explores the best relationship between patent disclosure and amendment, and advocates using different standards to handle the amendment of claims from that of specification. The fourth section observes the standards of enablement and establishes the methodology of the assessment of"sufficient disclosure"and"support". Finally, the paper ends up by the comprehensive analysis of one of the current hot topics—experimental evidence, try to change the attitude of SIPO toward it and recommends that the Guidelines of SIPO should grant more discretion to its assessment.