Machinery News

Battenfeld wins litigation against Chinese manufacturer

The company has been manufacturing pipe extrusion lines with know-how from its European parent companies in Germany and Austria. It filed a suit in 2003, when it was originally known as Battenfeld Chen Extrusion Systems, in a Chinese court against one of its competitors, Dongguan-based Donghua Machinery, for product piracy concerning its PO 450 pipe extrusion line.

The court in Dongguan established in its 2007 ruling that Donghua Machinery unlawfully used confidential documents detailing the manufacture of PO pipe extrusion lines. Donghua Machinery was ordered to destroy immediately all illegally obtained copies of drawings and other technical information as well as all PO 450 pipe extrusion equipment manufactured on the basis of these documents, whether still in production or already on the market. Production, sale and marketing of these products by Donghua was prohibited and a fine of RMB500,000 was imposed.

However, Donghua Machinery did not accept the ruling and appealed to Guangdong Higher People's Court arguing that the PO pipe extrusion technology claimed as intellectual property by Battenfeld-Cincinnati was actually public domain and could be obtained by reverse engineering after the product's launch on the market.

In response, Battenfeld-Cincinnati presented conclusive evidence that its technical information was unique and had never been released to the public in any form and that the technical parameters related to processing know-how, materials for parts, tolerance matching, surface roughness and assembly dimensions used for this extrusion line could not have been obtained by means of simple reverse engineering such as disassembly and mapping. In addition to this, Donghua Machinery could not offer proof that it had independently developed the technology in question.

Based on these facts, the Chinese court found Donghua to have illegally obtained the technical information and passed its verdict in 2010.