4.8. Broad claims

In T 607/93 the board decided that when novelty and inventive step were being assessed, there was no reason to use the description to interpret an excessively broad claim more narrowly, if it was a question not of understanding concepts that required explanation but rather of examining an excessively broad request in relation to the state of the art. This was applied in e.g. T 2487/12, T 5/14 and T 1173/17.