Unitalen succeeded in acting on behalf of “Haier” mobile phone in the first instance hearing concerning the infringement of patent rights

September 16, 2005
On March 15 of 2005, Wenwu Xie sued Qingdao Haier Communication Co. Ltd (hereinafter referred to as “Haier”) before Beijing No.1 Intermediated People’s Court and claimed: “intelligent anti-theft” function borne within defendant’s 3100 mobile phone is simply the imitation of his patent “report the loss of the mobile phone by automatically secret dialing ”, therefore, the aforesaid products should be considered as infringement.
Upon the receival of the response notification, Haier empowered Unitalen and appointed Mr. Changming Lu (Attorney at patent) and Yong Liang (barrister) as its attorney to draft response strategy. By thorough deduction and analysis, Unitalen discovered that the plaintiff disobeyed Prosecution history estopple”, consequently, the claims are expected to be overcame if challenge the infringement accusation by taking advantage of “Prosecution history estoppel”.
On June 6, 2005, the hearing was held publicly by the court and during which, the accused mobile phone was tested on site. Then after the hearing, the court determined that since the plaintiff limited and disclaimed part of his rights during the approval of the patent, the estoppel should apply. Accordingly, the court believed that the intelligent anti-theft method applied on the accused products is technically substantially different from that of the plaintiff, on the grounds that unauthorized user cannot use the accused products, also, it applies secret dialing whereas the plaintiff’s is apparent; the applied anti-theft method are neither identical nor equal to plaintiff’s patent, therefore, does not fall within the protection of plaintiff’s patent. Thus, due to the lack of factual and legal basis, plaintiff’s claims were not supported by the court.
On July 29 of 2005, the court of first instance decided to refute all of the plaintiff’s claims.

 

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