Research In The Accession Of The Patent Under The Doctrine Of Equivalents

Patent accession is a new concept, but the fact which it directed has existed for a long time. Only because of previous laws and cases didn’t examine technological improvement from the angle of patent accession, but judge whether a improved technological fruit is substantial similar with basis patent on the doctrine of equivalents, that means distinguish the specious improvement to sift the real one. The reason why we can do it like this is because the relationship between equivalent infringement and patent accession is mutual exclusive. So when we Clarify the judging standards of equivalent infringement, we could ascertain patent accession’s standards.Under guidance of these ideas, the Subject content composed as follows:First, this article introduced the background, significance, methods and status on domestic and overseas of this research, then elaborated the questions about the judging standards and ownership distribution which are often caused by the patent accession in the field of patent infringement in order to reveal the mutual exclusive relationship between the two and prove the rationality of the basic ideas that we could clarify the judging standards of equivalent infringement to certain the accession’s area. Second, to judge equivalents infringement, we should research its history and development to find its space reasonably in theory, so the space of patent accession could be determined either. The article researched the development of doctrine of equivalents in the history of America as the starting point, and then arranged the changes of the limited principle for doctrine of equivalents, analyzed the limitations under the statute and case law, which divided into internal restriction and external restriction. From this two restriction, the article derived two areas out of the doctrine of equivalents and patent accession, which are the bastardize patent and the prior art. Finally based on the outline above, this paper integrated the standards for judging the "equivalent","bastardize patent" and "the prior art" to reach a conclusion that is the standard of judging the patent accession, as well as proved the necessity to establish the special legal system for patent accession. Meanwhile this paper improved the doctrine of equivalents in present law to make it match with the patent accession better.