Different views from the EPO and Germany on the same case 1. Introduction Functional features in patent claims may provide protection not only for specific embodiments disclosed in the patent specification, but also for undisclosed (future) embodiments. A classic example is a claim of the format “An inhibitor of protein P for the treatment of…

This morning the European Court of Justice (“ECJ”) added a new extravagant decision to the long list of odd judgments on intellectual property matters that during the last stages of negotiation of Regulation (EU) 1257/2012 (unitary patent protection) caused the European Union’s legislative bodies to remove the yet-to-come “unitary patent” from the reach of the…

The Board observed that it could not be understood that the “technical relevance” criterion, proposed by another board in T 1906/11 for judging extension of subject matter, defines a new standard for judging amendments with respect to Article 123(2) in the case of intermediate generalizations. Instead, the Board had to decide whether the technical information…

The Board of Appeal accepted that filing of a criminal complaint for patent infringement could meet the EPC condition of Art. 105 EPC, for intervention that ‘proceedings for infringement´ have been instituted. In the present case, the licensee of the patent raised a criminal complaint (‘Privatanklage’ under Austrian law), requesting a court to institute criminal…

An amendment of independent patent claim 1 during prosecution introduced a new feature. According to the Examining Division this led to the combinations of features of dependent claims 2-4 to extend beyond the disclosure of the application as filed (Art. 123(2) EPC). The Board of Appeal held that the focus of the Examining Division was…

The main principles applicable for assessing whether a non-disclosed disclaimer meets the requirements of Article 123(2) EPC have been laid out in the decision G 1/03 of the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) of the EPO. In the recent decision G 2/10 dated September 19, 2011 a new test for assessing the allowability of non-disclosed disclaimers, the so called “Remaining Subject-Matter Test”, has been established. In applying this test, disclaimers which in the past would have been considered to be allowable in view of G 1/03 may now be (and actually have been)found to actually be in violation of Article 123(2) EPC.