The evaluation of whether an invention has inventive step should be based on Paragraph 3 of Article 22 of the Patent Law.
1 Judgment of outstanding substantive features
To determine whether an invention has outstanding substantive features is to judge whether the claimed invention has outstanding substantive features to those skilled in the art. Is there technology obvious?
If the claimed invention is obvious compared to the prior art, it does not have outstanding substantive features; conversely, if the comparison results show that the claimed invention is non-obvious compared to the prior art, It has outstanding substantive characteristics.
Judgment Method
To determine whether the claimed invention is obvious compared to the prior art, the following three steps can usually be followed.
(1) Determine the closest prior art
(2) Determine the distinguishing features of the invention and the technical problem actually solved by the invention
(3) Judgment Whether the claimed invention is obvious to those skilled in the art
2 Judgment of significant progress
When evaluating whether the invention is a significant progress, we should mainly consider whether the invention is beneficial technical effects. In the following cases, the invention should generally be considered to have beneficial technical effects and significant progress:
(1) The invention has better technical effects compared with the existing technology, such as improved quality, increased output, Save energy, prevent and control environmental pollution, etc.;
(2) The invention provides a technical solution with a different technical concept, and its technical effect can basically reach the level of the existing technology;
(3) The invention represents the development trend of a certain new technology;
(4) Although the invention has negative effects in some aspects, it has obvious positive technical effects in other aspects.