Amendments to a patent (application) are bound to strict rules under the European Patent Convention (EPC). According to Art. 123(2) of the EPC, a European patent (application) may not be amended in such a way that it contains subject-matter which extends beyond the content of the application as filed. Adding subject-matter which is not disclosed would give an applicant an unwarranted advantage and could be damaging to the legal security of third parties. (G 1/93, OJ 1994, 541) The ‘gold standard’ of the European Patent Office’s Board of Appeal is that any amendment can only be made within the limits of what a skilled person would derive directly and unambiguously, using common general knowledge, and seen objectively and relative to the date of filing, from the whole of the documents as filed (G 3/89, OJ 1993,117; G 11/91, OJ 1993, 125).
Okay, this result, which was recently reached by TBA 3.3.04 in decision T 394/11 (in German language), may perhaps not come as a big surprise to you, since we all learnt in school that acetic acid is a classic example of an organic acid as opposed to an inorganic acid. Yet it raises two interesting…
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…
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…
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.
In September of 2013, the Spanish Patents and Trademarks Office (“SPTO”) published a draft Patents Act aimed at modernising the old Act 11/1986, of 20 March, on Patents, which is close to celebrating its 30th anniversary. After hearing the stakeholders concerned, on 11 April 2014 the Council of Ministers approved the draft and sent it…
The judgement “Schleifprodukt” rendered by the German Federal Court of Justice on 25 November 2014 could be seen as a step towards harmonisation with the EPO because the court carried out the test for the admissibility of claim amendments by assessing whether the feature combination of the amended claim in its entirety represents a technical teaching which is identifiable from the original application as being suitable for achieving the effects of the invention.
Thanks to Miquel Montaña’s brilliant Christmas post, we have learnt a lot about the lucina sine (aut cum) concubitu and the legal impact her involvement may have had for the application of Directive 98/44/EC to the event leading to the holidays that we have just been celebrating. While I must admit that even after having…
The recent decision T 1843/09 clarifies that the exception to the prohibition of reformatio in peius set out in G 1/99 in order to overcome an objection under Article 123(2) EPC is not the only exception. According to the Technical Board of Appeal, exceptions to this principle are a matter of equity in order to protect a non-appealing Proprietor against procedural discrimination in circumstances where the prohibition of reformatio in peius would impair the legitimate defence of its patent.
In decision T 373/12 of 2 April 2014 the Enlarged Board has been asked to decide on the extent to which the clarity of claims amended during opposition proceedings and opposition appeal proceedings can be challenged when the amendments are based on dependent claims as granted.
In Medeva (C-322/10 of 24 November 2011) the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) had ruled that a Supplementary Protection Certificate relating to a combination of active ingredients can only be granted in view of Art. 3(a) of the Regulation (EC) No. 469/2009, if the active ingredients are “specified” in the wording of…
