Facts of the Case

Vallourec Oil & Gas France, the patentee, is a global leader in high-quality seamless steel tube solutions, mainly serving the energy market (oil & gas, power generation) and focusing on research of the most complex application environments. Relying on six major R&D centers and over 500 engineers and technicians worldwide, the company constantly maintains its leading technological advantage to meet the latest demands of its customers.

Vallourec, as a company with significant technologies in the field of seamless steel tubes, is deeply aware of the importance of patent protection. Upon discovering that a major state-owned enterprise had infringed upon its patent on steel tubes for oil fields, Vallourec chose to resort to legal means to defend its rights and interests. Recently, the Urumqi Intermediate People's Court made its first-instance judgment, in which the court determined the infringement facts of the defendant and ordered the defendant to cease the infringement, and to compensate the plaintiff for economic losses and reasonable expenses totaling 800,000 yuan.

Case Analysis

This case involves large-scale specialized equipment for oil fields, and the focus and difficulty of this case lie in how to obtain the evidence of infringement and conduct technical comparison.

Firstly, the particularity of the product sued for infringement poses significant challenges in the evidence collection. Given the complex production process of steel tubes for oil fields and the involvement of commercial secrets, Unitalen's attorney team and the plaintiff's technical expert team ultimately determined the solution of collecting evidence from the user (an oil field company) of the product sued for infringement outside the case after repeated research and discussion.

Secondly, the complexity of the patent technology involved also increases the difficulty of the case. Casing tubes for oil are regarded as the "embroidery needle" of the metallurgical steel pipe industry. The attorney team and the plaintiff's technical expert team in this case proposed to adopt the approach of joint notarization of evidence preservation across multiple regions. By taking evidence from the model for notarization and performing the off-site survey for notarization of the product sued for infringement, the relevant features of the product sued for infringement were obtained for infringement comparison.

The victory of this case demonstrates the importance attached by the Chinese laws on intellectual property rights and provides stronger protection for domestic and foreign innovative subjects.