A board of appeal of the European patent office held that a decision to reject an opposition with grounds based on an improperly corrected version of the patent as granted maintains the text used in the decision to grant, without the corrections. A decision of the examining division to correct the text after grant by replacing handwritten text with a “clean copy” does not affect this, and a decision signed by only one member of the examining division is not effective. The board rebuked the EPO for failure to include information in the public file to enable verification of who had signed the decision.
A full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer IP Law
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