A recent decision by the German Federal Court of Justice (Polyesterabmischungen, X ZR 90/11) relating to a patent concerning polyester resin blends may be instructive to demonstrate how an experimental report reproducing a prior art test instruction can be helpful to a nullity plaintiff, even if the description in the prior art document is incomplete…
By Klemens Stratmann Currently, the parties involved in appeal proceedings before the EPO see a clear trend towards decisions rendered on formal grounds. If the patentee files new requests along with the statement setting out the grounds of appeal without sufficiently addressing the decision per se, he runs the risk that the appeal is held…
Some musings about a song by Georg Kreisler and about the most recent plans of the President of the EPO to have the Boards of Appeal move to Vienna. The unforgettable Austrian–American Viennese-language cabarettist, satirist, composer, and author Georg Kreisler (1922-2011) once wrote a famous song having the title „Death must be a Viennese, just…
A new decision by the German Federal Court of Justice (X ZR 112/13 – Teilreflektierende Folie) provides another illustrative example of the FCJ’s fairly generous and applicant-friendly case law on the allowability of amendments and priority. The patent at stake was a European Patent directed to the use of an image projector, a reflective surface…
…well not really, but the German Federal Court of Justice has recently issued a decision (Kreuzgestänge, X ZR 103/13) that may expose Germany’s “Bifurcation System” to even more questions and criticism than in the past. Bifurcation is a term probably originating from geography and generally means “splitting of a main body into two parts”. An…
Some Late Summer Thoughts about Molten Polymers and two Decisions by the German Federal Court of Justice Now that the unusual heat of this summer in central Europe finally seems to have ended, it might be a good point in time to activate our cerebral bio-polymers again. So let us muse about the melting of…
No, not what you might perhaps have hoped for. A lot is currently ongoing at the European Patent Office about the status, the independence, the future location and the (self-)administration of the EPO’s Boards of Appeal, but this blogger is neither sufficiently well-informed nor competent to comment on the big picture. So let’s stick to…
When defining the technical problem underlying an invention, it may not simply be assumed that the person skilled in the art needed to address a particular problem. On the contrary, the technical problem must be formulated so generally and neutrally that the question as to which incentives a person skilled in the art obtained from…
(a) Advantages of the invention that have only become evident once the invention was made, and at which therefore the skilled person would not have directed his efforts to further develop the state of the art, may not be used to define the technical problem underlying the invention (the Aufgabe of the invention). (b) Depending…
In T 2130/11 the Board held that a disclaimer removing more than strictly necessary to restore novelty would not be in contradiction with the spirit of G 1/03 if it was required to satisfy Article 84 EPC and it did not lead to an arbitrary reshaping of the claims.
