Examination Standards of Earphone Devices Should be Loose Due to Its Narrower Technology Domain
2009/04/08 TaiwanOn March 15, 2007, the Taipei High Administrative Court overruled the Taiwan Intellectual Property Office’s (TIPO) and the Committee of Appeal of the Ministry of Economic Affairs’ decisions of rejecting patent application no. 090121307 with the title of “Headphone Device”. In the said decision, the Court deemed the defendant’s decision of that the disputed patent can be easily accomplished by a person having ordinarily knowledge in the art based on the proposed prior art to be incorrect.
The Court noted that after the TIPO issued a rejection against the disputed patent for the reason that the embodiment of the diagram 6A of the disputed patent lacked inventive step, claim 1 of the disputed patent was amended to include the phrase of “the ear hanging device is an arm extended downward from the top of the headband with an arc shaped end” and the applicant filed a request for reexamination of the disputed patent. However, regardless of the fact that the disputed patent was amended to include the said phrase and therefore excluded the embodiment of the diagram 6A, the reexamination rejection issued by the defendant was still based on the same reason as the initial rejection.
The Court also provided that as the ear-hanging device indicated in claim 1 of the disputed patent was separated from the main body of the earphone, the structures and functions of the disputed patent were different from those of the prior art proposed by the defendant. Moreover, the Court explained that as the technology domain of earphone devices was narrow, the examination standards of inventive step should be looser to encourage the modifications of inventions.
At last, the Court noted that according to claim 2 of the disputed patent, the centerline of the rotary axis of the rotatable earphone component could be rotated to form an angle with the centerline of the main body of the earphone. However, for the proposed prior art, the centerline of the rotary axis of the earphone component could only overlap with the centerline of the main body of the earphone to form a single straight line. Therefore, the Court regarded the defendant’s opinion of that claim 2 of the disputed patent lacked inventive step due to the same structures and functions as the proposed prior art to be questionable.
Based on the reasons listed above, the Court invalidated the decisions by the TIPO and the Committee of Appeal, and ordered the disputed patent to be reexamined.
Organized and translated by Tony Chen
