Existing Patent's Application Usages

Question

I have an idea which is very close to an existing patent CN 103839021 A. However, its application and working is completely different than what is mentioned in that patent. I came across the section in the description where it states :

"It should be understood that the present invention is not limited to the specific embodiments, the scope of the invention being indicated by the appended claims."

Does this mean that the inventor has restricted the idea's application and usage claims all to himself.

Answer 1

The intention behind the passage you quoted is that the applicant wants to cover the overall concept of their invention, not just the specific uses of it that they provided in the description. However, the sentence likely has very little real, legal effect.

This is because a patent's scope is always set out by the claims. There are some cases in some countries when the claims are interpreted in light of the description, and may therefore be limited by the specific embodiments described. However, that will occur regardless of whether the description includes a sentence like that.

So basically what I'm saying is: you should focus on considering what the scope of the claims is, and effectively ignore that sentence.

As an aside, CN 103839021 A is actually a patent application, not a granted patent. I can tell this because the kind code is "A". A granted Chinese patent has the kind code "C". In fact, it looks like it has not even been examined yet.