British Gas succeeds in patent suit over smart meters
Energy company British Gas has succeeded in a patent lawsuit against VanClare, which owns a UK patent for a smart utility metering system.
The judgment, issued on Friday, September 16 at the English High Court, found that the patent, UK number GB 364 420, was invalid.
Mr Justice Daniel Alexander also ruled that if the patent were valid, all of British Gas’s installed systems and proposed metering systems would have infringed certain claims.
VanClare, and the patent’s exclusive licensee Meter-Tech, claimed that British Gas should pay royalties for its past, current and proposed smart meter systems.
Meter-Tech had argued that the claim for infringement is significant because it “potentially affects, among other things, a £600 million contract for the installation of up to 16,000,000 smart meters throughout the UK”.
Alexander had heard expert advice from Martin Pollock, former head of regulatory affairs at Siemens Metering Services, on behalf of Meter-Tech, and Andrew James, former chief scientist at Secure Meters, on behalf of British Gas.
On Pollock, Alexander said: “In general, he did his best to assist the court but, on the key aspect of the case, I found the reasons he gave for considering the main disputed integer of the main claims to be inventive to be inadequate.”
He invalidated the patent because of a lack of inventive step, adding that amendments which had been proposed by Meter-Tech should be refused on the basis that they would not result in a valid patent.
Alexander said that prior art, which consisted of a paper presented at the Sixth International Conference on Metering Apparatus and Tariffs for Electricity Supply in April 1990 and a patent application, published in July 1999, by a number of companies engaged in electricity supply in New Zealand, made VanClare’s patent claims obvious.
The proceedings originally commenced in the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court (IPEC) as a claim for revocation by British Gas.
Meter-Tech then issued a claim for infringement in the High Court against British Gas, together with an application to transfer the IPEC invalidity proceedings to the High Court.
The IPEC case was transferred to the High Court in June 2015 and the proceedings consolidated.
