The LEHMAN, Lee & Xu China Patents Newsletter keeps you up to date on recent developments in China Patents law.
China Revises Patent Review Guidelines
The Revised Patent Review Guidelines has been deliberated and approved by the SIPO, and will enter into force on 2017.4.1. The revised guideline shows that China is improving requirement on the quality of patent at the same time when encouraging innovation of enterprises, more and more companies to attach importance to improving the quality of patent application, instead of going after quantity alone.
Special focuses of the Guideline Business mode with technical characteristics can obtain patent protection under the revised Guidelines. Claim of rights involving business mode cannot be excluded the possibility of obtaining right of patent if it not only includes business rules but also technical characteristics. This new change indicates that enterprises need to pay attention to dig the technical characteristics in their business modes, and write them into the claim of rights.
Improving invention patent protection of computer programs in fields of Internet, big data and e-commerce. The new guidance further clarifies that “a computer program itself” differs from “invention relating to a computer program”, showing that only “a computer program itself” cannot be the object of patent protection, while “invention relating to a computer program” can get such protection.
Increasing publicity of the documents during the review to better serve the enterprise.This new rule makes it more convenient for enterprises to master the actual situation during patent application and assignment. The range which the public have access to is enlarged under the revised guidance to the substantial exam procedure, including the examination guideline, search report as well as the letter of decision. In this way, applicants can improve their quality of application writing after doing detailed research on the prior applications of the same field, thus improving the quality of patent application.
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