Patent decision

BL number

O/015/12

Concerning rights in

GB2417385

Hearing Officer

Mr A C Howard

Decision date

19 January 2012

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Linstol UK Limited v David Huang

Provisions discussed

Patents Act 1977 section 72(1) and Patents Rules 2007 rules 74 and 82

Keywords

Amendment, Claim construction, Inventive step, Novelty, Revocation

Related Decisions

None

Summary

Revocation was sought on the grounds of lack of novelty, inventive step and sufficiency.

The invention relates to an acoustic device comprising both a noise reduction unit and a porous body to provide both active and passive noise reduction in a resonance chamber of the device, and finds particular use in the context of noise-reducing headphones. The Hearing Officer construed the main claim as not requiring deliberate apportionment of sound absorption characteristics between active and passive noise reduction and thus found that it was not novel. He also found the dependent claim to lack an inventive step. It was not considered appropriate to decided separately on the question sufficiency.

The patentee’s request at the hearing to amend the counterstatement to include conditional amendments was allowed under Rule 82 as the patentee had not had an opportunity to respond fully to the case before him in view of the late inclusion of a decisive document to bolster the claimant’s case. Thus the Hearing Officer allowed the patentee a period of time to offer amended claims under section 75, failing which the patent would be revoked. The claimant was awarded costs to date in the action.

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URL: http://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKIntelP/2012/o01512.html