Invalidity Study on Blocking Patent for Alloy Bulk Manufacturing
A reputed and established alloy-making company in Switzerland. The making company wanted to manufacture a ferrosilicon alloy in bulk; the composition of the very ferrosilicon alloy was found to be patented by a European company. The key challenge was to find valid prior arts that could be used to oppose and invalidate the blocking patent. The main obstacle was to find prior art that mentioned a specific percentage range of a rare earth element in the ferrosilicon alloy composition. Many cited documents that mentioned similar ferrosilicon alloy composition closely missed the boundary of the specific percentage range for that rare earth element. To approach this opposition search, the IP search team understood the granted claims and explored patent registrar documents to understand the opinion of examiners during prosecution and search strategies adopted by the examiner. IP search team exploited various patent and non-patent search databases such as Derwent Innovation, Orbit, and Scopus to get relevant prior arts. A sole keyword search couldn’t help to get a good result. IP search team then approached the search using very specific F-terms and IPC/CPC Classes. An old JP-relevant patent document was captured via this mode that mentioned a similar composition with that specific rare earth element in the specified percentage range. The curious thing was that the keyword was not able to locate this document due to poor English translation. The client has filed an opposition against this EP patent recently; arguments produced during the opposition prosecution by the patent owner do not seem to be strong enough to counter the disclosure present in the prior art found by us.The Client
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