This case concerns a referral to the Enlarged Board of Appeal regarding the interpretation of the term ‘pending application’ in the wording of Rule 25(1) EPC 1973. In the appealed decision from the receiving section, the receiving section held that from the date of the refusal by an examining division an application was no longer…
During appeal proceedings, the appellant argued lack of inventive step on the basis of public prior use of a composition for making the claimed product. The prior use appeared to relate to an ordinary commercial transaction. The patentee argued that the offer, sale and delivery of the product were only for test purposes. The Board…
The claims of the patent in suit related to a memory for sensing sub-groups of memory cells that required the activation of word line segments and corresponding sets of sense amplifiers in combination. The patentee argued that from one of the objectives of the invention mentioned in the original application, the skilled person could derive…
In the search report of the patent application several prior art references were mentioned that were not described in the patent application as originally filed, while they were known to the applicant. The Examining Division had decided that Rule 42(1) EPC 2000 would not allow a later introduction of the discussion of the prior art…
The Board of Appeal had to decide on a main request for a divisional application that corresponded to an auxiliary request for the parent application on which the Board had already finally decided. The Board of Appeal found the appeal for the divisional application inadmissible because subject-matter on which a final decision has been taken…
Claim 1 of the patent application contained the feature that ‘the device is adapted to generate L addresses, which are smaller in number than N = Ng × 2m2 virtual addresses for reading data from said interleaver memory in which L data bits are stored’. The Board of Appeal noted that it might be true…
The invention related to text mining using mathematical techniques such that information can be presented in a way that can be more easily understood or evaluated by a user. The Board of Appeal noted that it is a fundamental question whether such an invention is within a field of technology. It can hardly be regarded…
When the transitional provisions for EPC 2000 are silent, the Board has to establish which legal text is applicable. In that case the Board has to take into account that it is undesirable to use both different versions of the EPC over a prolonged period of time and that there is no indication that the…
The Board reversed a refusal of the patent application for lack of technical contribution. The underlying decision had expressed the view that the idea of making chance encounters depend on time was a game rule, which is itself excluded from patentability and had been implemented in straightforward manner. In its classical sense game rules form…
The degree of effectiveness of the invention (here: the removal of prion proteins) is an issue related to the technical problem solved by the invention. This is to be considered when assessing inventive step, and is thus not relevant for sufficiency of disclosure. As the invention is sufficiently disclosed in the specification, the fact that…
