Abstract:    The quality of patents consists of two meanings: one is whether the patent meets the statutory authorization requirements; the second is the difference between the economic, technical and legal indicators of the granted patent. The evaluation of the merits of this difference can be used as an important indicator to distinguish the quality of patents. Patent invalidation procedures are a challenge to the validity of patents, and it is more likely that a patent that remains valid in an invalid procedure will have a relatively high quality. A patent that is declared invalid may be considered to be inconsistent with the patent authorization standard stipulated by the Patent Law. The final result of the patent invalidation process will affect corporate innovation and technology research and development and patent applications. Such a review process has been affirmed by the patent systems of countries around the world. The vast majority of patent laws in various countries have provisions for "invalid review procedures" or "objection procedures".Although existing researches are concerned that high-value, high-quality patents may be more prominent in some indicators, high-quality patents themselves are difficult to distinguish, and high-quality patents by means of award-winning patents are not necessarily completely reliable. Scholars have a positive attitude toward the role of patent invalidation procedures: patents that can cause invalid procedures are often patents that have higher value in the industry, and those patents that successfully resist invalid review not only enhance their own value, but also become a proof of high quality. The patent invalidation procedure is an important way to examine the quality of patents, and the results of patent invalidation are less than the research results of analyzing patent quality. According to the existing research, this paper assumes that the quality of patents that have been filed for invalidation and obtained is relatively high, and the quality of patents that have been declared invalid is relatively low; after the invalidation, patents and patents declared invalid are maintained. The difference can be used as one of the important factors to distinguish between high and low value and quality. A sample of patents filed for invalidation in the field of information and communication technology (ICT) between 2008 and 2017 is sampled. Based on the grouping of patent validity, the forward citation of the two sets of patents "maintaining effective" and "declaring invalidity" is analyzed. A total of 7 indicators, such as quantity and number of claims, were compared and analyzed, in order to find out the factors affecting the quality of patents from the perspective of patent invalidation procedures.For the analysis of the characteristics of the six hypothetical and invalid procedure invoking the law, the SPSS22.0 software is mainly used for descriptive statistics and independent sample T-test to verify the above hypothesis, observe the Chinese Patent Law and the Chinese Patent Law Implementation Rules, it is cited in the sample of two sets of patent invalidation procedures. After verifying the hypothesis, through the method of evaluation one by one, find out the characteristics of the valid group patents that are different from the invalid group patents, and analyze the significance of these characteristics for patent quality. The differences in the relevant indicators of the two groups of patents in the application, authorization and invalidation stages reflect the characteristics of high-quality patents in the ICT field. After analysis, the following two conclusions are drawn. On the one hand, there are significant differences in the patent quality indicators between the two groups of patent technology coverage, patent citations and non-patent literature citations. The effective group patents are smaller in technical coverage than the ineffective group. The effective group patents cite patent documents less than the invalid group patents, and the effective group patents refer to more non-patent documents than the invalid groups. On the other hand, although the number of claims, technical coverage and other indicators can represent the quality of patents, the analysis of the invoking laws in the invalid program shows that the effective group patents are satisfied both in terms of the satisfaction of the substantive requirements of the patent and the satisfaction of the procedural requirements. While those low-quality patents are authorized and may have high economic value, but there may be fatal flaws on both substantive and procedural issues, and lost the effectiveness once they encounter the invalid review.Although there are many factors involved in the evaluation of patent quality, there are always some individual and common indicators that play a major and fundamental role. Based on the above research conclusions, the following suggested countermeasures can be drawn. Firstly, the technical coverage, the number of patent citations, and the number of non-patent literature citations are of great significance in judging the quality of patents in the ICT field. When selecting indicators for evaluating patent quality, one should pay attention to the specific industry field of the research object. On the other hand, it should be noted that not all existing patent quality judgment models for general patents or other fields can be directly applied. Secondly, when judging the quality of patents in the ICT field, we do not have to pay so much attention to its economic value. This study shows that even patents that are authorized and of high economic value may be invalidated in subsequent invalid review procedures due to patent applications, modified procedures, and entity issues. Thirdly, for the judgment of patent quality, patent application documents and authorization documents should be focused on. Although there are multiple factors affecting the quality of patents in terms of commonality, when judging the quality of a single patent, it is equally important to invalidate the requester, competitors and potential infringers, as well as the examiners in the invalid review process, because patent validity is the basic problem of patent quality inspection. Article 65 of Chinese Regulations on the Implementation of the Patent Law details the reasons why patent invalidation requests can be invoked, and should also be given special attention.

Key words:  ICT, invalid procedure, patent quality, influencing factor