A patent is a legal document that gives its owner the lawful right to exclude others from making, using, selling, exporting and importing an invention within 20 years from the date of its filing. Hence, the owner has statutory rights to stop infringement of his invention, claim damage or illegitimate profit from infringers of the patent. In the present case, your colleague Steven has provided Invention Disclosure on A Massage Tool with Sleeves (see Appendix as WO2018/089466A1 attached). Steven came to you for advice because you have recently learnt about patenting. Particularly, Steven asks you if his invention is patentable or not. You are a good friend of Steven and wishes to give fair assessment on patentability for Steven' Invention. After conducting some prior art search with database Google Patents, you have found 02 Published patent documents (known as 1st prior art document & 2 nd prior art document) that appear to disclose some features of Steven' invention (see Appendix: US4461285A as D1, WO/2016/022843A1 as D2).

Discuss on the patentability of Steven' invention in terms of following aspects: 1. Novelty (45 marks) 2. Inventive Step (30 marks) 3. Industrial Applicability (15 marks) 4. Conclusion (10 marks) ---- END OF ASSIGNMENT ----