The Beijing High Court has recently resumed its hearing of a lawsuit brought by Hu Xuanhu, Hu Bin and Dalian Hanpu Applied Technologies against Ericsson, after more than 11 years of twists and turns.
As early as July 2000, the three plaintiffs sued Ericsson (China) and Beijing Ericsson Mobile Communications before the Beijing High Court.
They claimed that the technology used in Ericsson’s T18, T28 and other mobile phone models constituted infringement of their patent right over a keyboard input method for Chinese characters.
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With Chinese patentees as plaintiffs against a multinational company, this patent infringement case once drew considerable public attention.
At the time of the hearing in 2000, Ericsson made a request to the Patent Re-examination Board that the disputed patent be declared invalid.
Three years later, the re-examination board made its ruling to uphold the validity of the disputed case.
Dissatisfied with the 2003 decision of the board, Ericsson China filed an administrative lawsuit with the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court, asking the court to revoke the 2003 decision.
In the second instance ruling, the Beijing High Court finally revoked the board’s 2003 decision and ordered the board to process Ericsson’s request again.
The re-examination board announced its new decision in 2009, declaring that claim 1 of the disputed patent is invalid, while announcing that it will still uphold claims 2, 3 and 4.
The Beijing High Court has now recently resumed its hearing of this patent infringement case.
Wang Yadong, the executive partner at Run Ming Law Office, represented Ericsson in the hearing.
He said that since the protection of the patent in dispute has been weakened, the court will eventually give the ruling that the technology used by Ericsson does not constitute infringement.
Wang said the major reason that the Beijing High Court revoked the Patent Re-examination Board’s 2003 decision is that one amendment the plaintiffs made to claim 1 in the notice of patent authorisation is beyond what is written in the original application documents, which is in violation of Article 33 of PRC Patent Law.
For this reason the Patent Re-examination Board declared in its 2009 decision that the plaintiffs’ patent right is partly invalid.
“The drawn-out length of time the case consumes is mainly the result of the patent validity review – a special feature of patent cases.
Such a review process has taken nearly nine years in the Ericsson case,” Wang said.
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