Durbeyfield filed a lawsuit against DuraPost for infringing three innovative patents related to Ezy drive, and the latter subsequently counterclaimed that the former's innovative patents were invalid. DuraPost claimed in the complaint that several innovative patents of DelNorth lacked creativity as stipulated in Article 7(4) of Australian Patent Law 1990. The judgment standard of innovative patent creativity has become the focus of this trial.
The Australian Federal Court has taken the following two steps when judging whether the Ezy drive patent is creative: ① Compare the invention technology in each claim with the existing technology to determine the difference between them; (2) The differences determined in step 1 should be reviewed by the technicians in the field according to the common knowledge in Australia before the relevant priority date to judge whether the technology of the invention is only different from the existing technology and has not made a substantial contribution to the invention.
Regarding "substantial contribution", the Federal Court of Australia made the following two points:
1 the standard of "no substantial contribution to the invention" in the creative examination of innovative patents is completely different from that in the standard patent investment stage examination.
Compared with the difference between the invention technology that is not practical or necessary and the existing technology, "substantial" means "practical" or "necessary".
The Federal Court of Australia pointed out that the following factors need not be considered when judging whether the invention technology is creative compared with the existing technology: whether the invention technology is superior to the existing technology; The degree to which the invention technology is different from the existing technology; Whether the invention technology can be obviously deduced from the existing technology.
Finally, the Australian Federal Court held that some of the claims in the Ezy-driven innovation patent in this case were creative.
This case once again makes it clear that the "creativity" standard of innovative patents is lower than that of standard patents, and innovative patents can be used to protect invention technologies that are only slightly different from existing technologies. In the future, innovative patents will be more difficult to be declared invalid due to lack of creativity, which will help protect the rights of patentees. In addition, the judgment of this case also means that products or methods with innovative patents are more likely to lose their competitive advantage.