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1. Applicability of the principle of the protection of legitimate expectations

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1. Applicability of the principle of the protection of legitimate expectations

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The principle of the protection of legitimate expectations applies to all procedural actions – whether formal or informal – taken by EPO employees vis-à-vis parties to proceedings (T 160/92, OJ 1995, 35; see also T 343/95; T 460/95 of 16 July 1996; T 428/98, OJ 2001, 494). It applies to both ex parte and inter partes proceedings (T 923/95). The requirements in connection with the principle of good faith to be observed by the EPO are the same vis‑à‑vis all parties involved in proceedings before the EPO, be they applicants, patent proprietors or opponents (T 161/96, OJ 1999, 331, see also J 12/94). The principle of the protection of legitimate expectations also applies to acts performed by other authorities concerned in Euro-PCT proceedings during the international phase such as the US Patent Office acting as receiving Office or as International Preliminary Examining Authority (J 13/03). It applies also to the conduct of national authorities when dealing with European patent applications filed with them under Art. 75(1)(b) EPC (J 34/03).

T 353/18

Discrepancies between the clean and the annotated versions of a request: no provision in the EPC establishing any legal primacy of the clean version over the annotated version; special reasons justifying a remittal (reasons: section 8)

Case law 2021
Case law 2019

In T 590/18 of 4 July 2018 the board held that a debit order filed on paper (EPO Form 1010) after 1 December 2017 could at most be accepted as a valid payment of the appeal fee if the appellant could successfully claim to have seen still current information clearly indicating the option of paying this way on the EPO website after the entry into force of the change to fee payment methods, to have been entitled to entertain a legitimate expectation as to that information's accuracy, and indeed to have acted in reliance on it. Finding a PDF version of a brochure published before the change's entry into force was not sufficient to establish such a legitimate expectation, especially when the appellant had anyway known about the change.

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