1.3. Standard for assessing compliance with Article 123(2) EPC

Catchword:

In general, an auxiliary request which is directed to a combination of granted dependent claims as new independent claim, and filed after the statement of grounds or the reply thereto, will be an amendment of the party's appeal case within the meaning of Article 13 RPBA 2020. See reasons 9. A skilled person assessing the contents of the original application documents uses his technical skill. If they recognise that certain elements of the original application documents are essential for achieving a technical effect then adding that technical effect to a claim without also adding the essential elements can create fresh subject-matter even if the essential elements are originally portrayed as being optional. See reasons 3.6.3.

Catchword:

To assess whether an amended patent claim contains added subject-matter under Article 123(2) EPC, the claimed subject-matter must first be determined by interpreting the claim from the perspective of the person skilled in the art. In a second step, it must be assessed whether that subject-matter is disclosed in the application as filed (Reasons 1.3.8 to 1.3.10).

Catchword: 

1.) Article 69 EPC in conjunction with Article 1 of the Protocol thereto can and should be relied on when interpreting claims and determining the claimed subject-matter in proceedings before the EPO, including for the purpose of assessing compliance with Article 123(2) EPC (Reasons 3.1-3.15).  2.) Although Article 69(1), second sentence, EPC requires that generally account be taken of the description and the drawings when interpreting a claim, the primacy of the claims according to Article 69(1), first sentence, EPC limits the extent to which the meaning of a certain claim feature may be affected by the description and the drawings (Reasons 3.16-3.16.2).  3.) Claim interpretation is overall a question of law which must as such ultimately be answered by the deciding body, and not by linguistic or technical experts. It does, however, involve the appraisal of linguistic and technical facts which may be supported by evidence submitted by the parties (Reasons 3.17).

Abstract

In T 1084/22 the patent concerned insulating glazing units, which typically consist of two glass sheets separated by a perimeter spacer. Specifically, it related to a method for creating such units. This involved providing a spacer body with adhesive on both sides in a storage container. Claim 1 was amended during examination to specify that the adhesive was a pressure sensitive adhesive.

The board was not convinced by the argument put forward by the appellant (patent proprietor) which aimed to show that the feature was implicitly derivable from the description.

The board found that the second line of argument submitted by the appellant was not convincing either. The appellant had submitted that the reference in the description of the application as filed to HBP8 (a US patent), which mentioned pressure sensitive adhesives, also provided an original basis for the added feature.

The board explained that the appealed decision referred to conditions developed in the case law for being able to incorporate features from a cross-referenced document (see in particular T 689/90). Thus, only under particular conditions would adding features from a cross-referenced document to a claim not be contrary to Art. 123(2) EPC, namely if (a) the description of the invention as filed left the skilled reader in no doubt that protection was sought or may be sought for those features; (b) that they implicitly clearly belonged to the description of the invention contained in the application as filed and thus to the content of the application as filed; and (c) that they were precisely defined and identifiable within the total technical information contained in the reference document.

The board viewed these conditions, along with alternative or reformulated criteria found in the cases cited in Case Law of the Boards of Appeal, 10^th ed. 2022, II.E.1.2.4, as different applications of the "gold standard". While different tests had been developed, they could only assist in determining whether an amendment complied with Art. 123(2) EPC, but did not replace the "gold standard" and should not lead to a different result. Thus, the board considered it sufficient and appropriate to apply the "gold standard" principle to this case.

In a case of incorporating features from a cross-d document, the "gold standard" essentially required that the skilled reader had to be able to directly and unambiguously derive which subject-matter of the incorporated document was part of the original application. In other words, which features of the application were to be taken from the referenced document.

Therefore, the question that the board needed to answer was whether, in the absence of any hindsight or knowledge of the amended claim, the skilled person reading the original documents would directly and unambiguously derive from the cross-reference to HBP8 that the adhesive's pressure sensitive nature was a feature to be incorporated from HBP8 into the original application. This required that when the skilled reader of the application as filed consulted HPB8 as instructed it was immediately clear to them that it was that feature and that feature alone that was to be included. If that feature was disclosed in a certain technical context in the cross-referenced document, then, applying the same standard as for intermediate generalisations, isolation of the feature was justified only in the absence of any clearly recognisable functional or structural relationship.

In the board's view it was neither immediately clear to the skilled person from the cross-reference to HBP8 that it was the feature of the adhesive being pressure sensitive that was to be included, nor that that feature could be taken out of its context in HPB8.

Hence, the board concluded that the amendment to claim 1 specifying the adhesive as "pressure sensitive" extended the patent's subject matter beyond the content of the original application.

Abstract

In T 566/20 the parties disagreed on the interpretation of the feature "the position information in association with the serial number information output from the position control device".

The appellant (opponent) submitted that the position control device could output the serial number information, possibly with the position information. In their opinion, this interpretation was grammatically correct, made technical sense and was not disclosed in the application as originally filed.

In the respondent's view, it was apparent from the claim that the output from the position control device concerned the position information in association with the serial number information. The respondent also noted that this interpretation was in accordance with the disclosure of the application as filed.

The board concurred with the appellant that outputting both the position information and the associated serial number information from the position control device was technically sensible. It further agreed with the appellant that the fact that the claim did not include a step of receiving serial number information did not necessarily mean that the position control device did not receive this information. Outputting both the position information and the serial number information allowed the vision measuring system to match position information with image information by unambiguously correlating serial number information associated with, or included in, each of them. This interpretation did not appear to give rise to incompatibilities with the remaining features of the claim.

Moreover, the board endorsed the view that a patent proprietor would be awarded an unwarranted advantage if it were allowed to restrict the claimed subject-matter by discarding at will technically reasonable interpretations in view of the description (see T 1127/16 and T 169/20). Therefore, the fact that the description and drawings support one interpretation of an ambiguous feature was not sufficient for other interpretations of the ambiguous feature that are technically reasonable in the context of the claim to be discarded.