Intellectual Property Enterprise Court

IP-2024-000057 - [2025] EWHC 1687 (IPEC)

Fecha: 08-Jul-2025

The equivalents case

The equivalents case

57.

The parties suggested alternative formulations of the inventive concept disclosed in the Patent. This was JGL’s:

‘In a hoist mechanism of the sort installable in and used for loading / unloading from a load carrying space of a vehicle, and of a construction having a pivotal actuator controlled lifting arm itself having a slidably adjustable upper section (generally horizontal when stowed) and a slidably adjustable lower section (generally upstanding when stowed), wherein both said adjustments can be made steplessly so as to allow each section to be secured at any desired position during installation to provide the maximum amount of adjustability for ﬁt and operative purposes.’

58.

Autochair declined to characterise its own inventive concept, rather putting its case on equivalence this way:

‘Stepless adjustments, as per the literal words of integer (F), enable the highest degree of adjustability so as to provide even the very smallest amount of headroom gains: see paragraph [0023] of the Patent. However the skilled addressee would understand that the inventive concept is broader than such literal words. In particular the inventive concept consists of both:

(a)

stepless adjustments, as per such literal words, and

(b)

stepped adjustments which are close enough to the same high degree of adjustability that they are equivalent to stepless (as is correctly summarised at paragraph 10 of the Claimant’s skeleton argument herein dated 4 December 2024).’

59.

The parties were thus agreed that integer F is part of the inventive concept, which is consistent with its being within the characterising portion of claim 1. So far as these proceedings are concerned it is integer F that matters. I think it is sufficient if I here treat the inventive concept as being the idea that the length of the projecting upper section and the height of the lifting arm are both adjusted steplessly. Put another way, it is the idea that Adjustments 1 and 3 are both stepless.