Hoover to take cleaner case to House of Lords

A legal dust-up over bagless vacuum cleaners is set to go to Britain's highest court after Hoover lost the latest round yesterday of a three-year battle with its rival Dyson Appliances.

The Court of Appeal upheld a judgment made last October that the Italian-owned Hoover company infringed the patent rights of James Dyson, inventor of the Dual Cyclone machine that made him a millionaire.

Lady Justice Arden underlined that Hoover had turned down approaches from Mr Dyson during the 1980s and repeatedly refused to accept bagless technology. She said: "It is perhaps one of the ironies of this case that Hoover – a household name with a pre-eminent reputation in domestic vacuum cleaning – should have itself rejected the opportunity to develop the Dyson patent and should now claim the judge was wrongly influenced by the industry 'mindset' against the bagless vacuum cleaning appliance."

The Dyson machine's arrival in the mid-1990s secured the company a 50 per cent share of Britain's £455m vacuum cleaner market, provoking rivals to introduce their own versions. Hoover was forced to withdraw its Triple Vortex cleaner after the High Court ruled it had copied Dyson's dust separation system and should pay compensation.

Alberto Bertali, Hoover's vice-chairman, said the battle was no longer commercially significant, but the company would appeal to the Lords because it "believed in the originality of its patented technology".