China SPC: Patent Theft Claims Belong in Ownership Suits
Can you ask for a patent to be invalidated on good-faith grounds because you believe the patentee stole your invention? In a case analysis published on 22 October, the Intellectual Property Tribunal of China's Supreme People's Court (SPC) says this is the wrong route: in case (2025) Zui Gao Fa Zhi Xing Zhong No. 794, it treated such a complaint as a dispute over patent ownership and inventorship, to be resolved through a civil action that establishes who owns the patent and who the real inventor is.
The dispute
A requester surnamed Yang claimed that three companies, partly anonymised in the court's text, had taken Yang's invention and used it to file a utility model patent. Yang asked the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) to invalidate the patent under Article 11 of the Implementing Regulations of the Patent Law as revised in 2023. CNIPA declined to examine that ground: in its view it applies only to invalidation requests filed after 20 January 2024, and Yang's was filed on 20 October 2023. Another ground, raised only at the oral hearing, was out of time. The Beijing Intellectual Property Court dismissed Yang's challenge, and Yang appealed.
SPC: an ownership and inventorship question
The SPC found that Yang's real complaint was that the companies had appropriated the invention and patented it, which prevented Yang's own later application from being granted. That is a civil dispute about where the technical solution came from, who owns the patent and who should be named as inventor, and the proper route is a civil suit to confirm ownership and the true inventor. Invalidating a patent simply because the patentee acted in bad faith, the court said, has no legal basis and does nothing for the real right holder. The appeal ground was rejected.
CNIPA can raise good faith on its own
The judgment added that, under Part IV, Chapter III, section 4.1 of the Patent Examination Guidelines, where obtaining a patent clearly breaches the principle of good faith, the examining panel may introduce the Article 11 ground of its own motion. CNIPA can therefore examine it even if the requester did not raise it or raised it too late. The court found the decision under review and the first-instance judgment partly wrong on this point, though their outcome stood.
What the good-faith ground targets
According to the case analysis, invalidation for breach of good faith polices the authenticity of the inventive activity itself: the technical solution must have been genuinely developed, not made up or falsified. False inventor attribution and patenting someone else's invention should be dealt with through ownership and inventorship disputes; using invalidation instead would work against the true right holder.
J&C recommends that companies or individuals who suspect their R&D results have been patented by someone else first gather evidence of where the technical solution came from, such as lab notebooks, test data, emails and cooperation agreements, before considering an ownership or inventorship action. In joint or commissioned development, agreeing in the contract who owns the results and who may apply for patents is easier than fighting over it later.
Source: ipc.court.gov.cn
