At the beginning of the 2025 New Year, Kangrui Law Firm received Decision No. 582525, a “Decision on Examination of Invalidation Request” issued by the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA), which upheld the validity of invention patent No. 201610042345.2 owned by Zhejiang Rifa Textile Machinery Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter “Rifa Textile Machinery”). This is undoubtedly a gratifying New Year’s gift.
1. Basic Facts of the Case
Founded in 2002, Rifa Textile Machinery is a key high-tech enterprise, a key backbone enterprise in the machinery industry, a demonstration enterprise under the 863 Program CIMS Project, a demonstration enterprise for CAD application engineering, and a vice-president member of the China Textile Machinery Association. The company mainly produces various types of textile machinery, including but not limited to spinning machines, weaving machines, and knitting machinery. These products are widely used across all segments of the textile industry. The company has successfully developed more than one hundred products in fifteen major series, covering cotton spinning, wool spinning, silk spinning, linen spinning, and blended spinning, with products sold throughout China and exported worldwide.
Invention patent No. 201610042345.2 is an important patent of the client Rifa Textile Machinery. It protects a vertical lifting structure of the half-dial (哈夫盘) and yarn feeder seat for a single-cylinder computerized sock knitting machine. On April 25, 2024, a competitor filed a request for invalidation. The grounds for invalidation raised by the requester included: lack of clarity in the claims, lack of support in the description, absence of necessary technical features in the claims, and lack of inventiveness in the claims, accompanied by a large volume of evidence. Rifa Textile Machinery therefore engaged Beijing Kangrui Law Firm to respond to the invalidation request in order to safeguard the company’s rights and interests.
2. Case Process and Result
After accepting the engagement, our team studied the technical solution of the patent in depth, actively communicated with the patentee to understand the case background, and researched the technical principles and details, thereby formulating a strategy to respond to the invalidation. After carefully examining the patent texts, our patent attorneys used color rendering to meticulously annotate the drawings of the patent, making the drawings clear and easy to understand and intuitively showing that there was no issue of lack of clarity in the patented technical solution. Upon an in-depth study of the other party’s invalidation grounds and evidence, our patent attorneys identified errors and gaps in the opposing evidence and drafted targeted and cogent counterarguments.
In the invalidation defense process, our patent attorneys used AI tools to look up and understand relevant technical terms and to help locate evidence of common general knowledge. Among these, a training manual on sock knitting played a crucial role. Specifically, the requester argued that “Evidence 1” disclosed a machine head of a sock knitting machine, and that for sock knitting machines—especially single-cylinder sock knitting machines—it is content that a person skilled in the art can directly and unequivocally determine that a half-dial (哈夫盘) is installed on the machine head; therefore, once a machine head is disclosed, a half-dial is disclosed. We used the common-knowledge evidence to show that even for single-cylinder sock knitting machines, not all models are equipped with a half-dial, and double-cylinder sock knitting machines in particular do not have a half-dial. Therefore, a half-dial is not necessarily installed on a sock knitting machine. The panel ultimately accepted our submission and found that Evidence 1 did not disclose the key feature of the patent—“the half-dial (哈夫盘) and its related structure.”
During the oral hearing, our patent attorneys explained to the panel the technical background, technical problems, points of invention, technical principles, and beneficial effects of the patent at issue, enabling the panel to gain a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of the patented technical solution. This allowed them to intuitively grasp the differences between the comparative documents and the patent at issue, as well as the absence of any teaching or motivation to combine.
After the hearing, our patent attorneys, drawing on the materials provided by the client, carefully prepared and submitted explanatory materials concerning the background technology and the technical problems of the patent. These materials enabled the panel to clearly and fully understand the inventive concept and inventive points of the patent. As a result, we ultimately helped the patentee win the invalidation case and successfully maintained the full validity of the patent rights.
The above invalidation defense process and details fully demonstrate our patent attorneys’ professionalism and their meticulous and rigorous working style. In the future, our lawyers will continue to uphold the service philosophy of professionalism, efficiency, and integrity, and provide clients with higher-quality and more comprehensive intellectual property legal services.