Background
Samsung brought proceedings concerning several telecommunications patents and FRAND licensing issues against ZTE and related defendants. This judgment followed Technical Trial A and addressed EP (UK) 3,934,154, a Samsung patent concerning the design of synchronisation-signal blocks used during initial access to a 5G New Radio network.
ZTE accepted that the patent was essential to the 5G standard and that its 5G-enabled devices would infringe absent a licence. The trial therefore concerned validity, with ZTE seeking revocation. Only claim 1 required separate consideration because the parties agreed that the remaining claims would stand or fall with it. ZTE alleged obviousness over the LG 434 prior art, argued that the claim was a collocation of independent inventions, and contended that it lacked a plausible technical effect or technical contribution.
The Court’s Holding
Mr Justice Mellor rejected each invalidity challenge. The court held that claim 1 did not lack an inventive step over LG 434 after examining the proposed sequence of steps from that document to the claimed arrangement and standing back to assess the alleged inventive journey as a whole. It also rejected ZTE’s contention that the claim merely combined independent inventions whose separate features could be assessed individually for obviousness.
The court further rejected ZTE’s no-technical-contribution argument. In that specific context, and absent a successful collocation case, ZTE could not establish lack of technical contribution by dividing the claim into individual features and treating each separately; the claim had to be considered as a whole. Because validity survived and essentiality and infringement were accepted, the court declared the patent valid, essential to 5G, and infringed by ZTE. It also found that, without a FRAND licence, ZTE threatened continued infringement.
Key Takeaways
- ZTE failed to prove that claim 1 was obvious over the LG 434 prior art.
- The court rejected the allegation that claim 1 was merely a collocation of independent inventions.
- For ZTE’s no-technical-contribution argument, the court assessed the claim as a whole because the collocation challenge had failed; it did not state that approach as a universal rule for every validity challenge.
Why It Matters
The decision confirms the validity and infringement of a Samsung patent accepted to be essential to the 5G standard, strengthening Samsung’s position in the parties’ unresolved international SEP and FRAND dispute.
It also illustrates the importance of defining the skilled person and common general knowledge by reference to the real technical field at the priority date, and of evaluating an obviousness case without hindsight across the full route alleged from the prior art to the claimed invention.