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The Supreme People's Court of China (SPC) recently issued revised "Provisions on Several Issues Concerning the Trial of Administrative Cases Involving the Patent Granting and Validity (I)" for comments. This is the first revised version of the Provisions since the SPC issued its original version in June 2018 and since the SPC assumed jurisdiction over the appeal proceedings on patent granting and validity cases in January 2019. The 2020 revised version includes 36 articles, as compared to 40 ones in the original 2018 version.
Among other changes, due to the revision of previous Article 13 into current Article 11, the Provisions can be considered as the implementation of the Article 1.10 in the phase one U.S.-China Deal, permitting pharmaceutical patent applicants to rely on supplemental data to satisfy the requirements on sufficiency of disclosure and inventive step during judicial proceedings. The Provisions also maintain an article that background art in the specification shall be excluded from prior art unless otherwise proven, but the language has been revised for clarity. Further, under the Provisions, the courts are allowed to revoke an invalidation decision in-part as to particular claims. The Court has asked for comments on the Provisions by June 15, 2020.
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