On May 16, 2025, the Federal Intellectual Property Service rendered a decision to satisfy the objection filed by «A.Zalesov & Partners» Patent & Law Firm against the issuance of a patent for a utility model protecting a certain structure of a grain dryer bed.
Before the lawyers of «A.Zalesov & Partners» entered the case, this patent had been challenged twice, but the Board of the Chamber for Patent Disputes refused to satisfy the objections and the patent remained valid, and the patent holder (the distributor of a British company) used this patent as one of the obstacles to Russian competitors entering the Russian market with their solutions.
«A.Zalesov & Partners» team managed to prove the fact that those grain dryers had been introduced into civil circulation by the patent holder himself long before the priority date. This fact allowed the Board of the Chamber for Patent Disputes of Rospatent to agree with the lawyers' arguments and recognize the inconsistency of the utility model with the «novelty» patentability term, despite the patent holder's arguments about the lack of proof of the fact that the grain dryers had such a design before the priority date.
The dispute is remarkable because the fact of «open use» of the product long before the priority date of the utility model, which is quite difficult to prove, was used to challenge the novelty of the utility model, and also because the patent holder filed a claim against infringement of a number of patents, including this patent, by our Client.
The client’s interests in this case were represented by managing partner Aleksey Zalesov, partner Maria Makhlina and patent attorney Ivan Istomin.