9.5. Technical disclosure in a prior art document

In line with the established case law of the boards of appeal, when investigating inventive step it should be borne in mind that the technical disclosure in a prior art document should be considered in its entirety, as it would be done by a person skilled in the art and that it is not justified arbitrarily to isolate parts of such document from their context in order to derive from them technical information which would be distinct from the integral teaching of the document (T 56/87, OJ 1990, 188; T 768/90; T 223/94; T 115/96; T 717/96; T 414/98). According to T 95/90, different parts of text in a document can be combined if there is nothing to stop the skilled person from doing so. Any ex post facto analysis of a document, i.e. any attempt to misinterpret the disclosure of the prior art so as to distort the proper technical teaching of the disclosure in order to arrive at the claimed subject-matter, should be avoided since this would conceal the real technical contribution of the invention (T 1967/08).