7.3.4 Case law concerning oral proceedings held after G 1/21 and prior to the end of pandemic measures at the Boards of Appeal
This section has been updated to reflect case law and legislative changes up to 31 December 2023. For the previous version of this section please refer to the "Case Law of the Boards of Appeal", 10th edition (PDF). |
According to the board in T 250/19, a party could easily reproduce the fairly basic "whiteboard" function and share the screen. Besides, the very Zoom application used by the boards for videoconferences offered the possibility of using a virtual whiteboard. Similar considerations applied to using a "flipchart".
In response to the appellant's argument that filing further auxiliary requests during oral proceedings in T 1158/20 would not be possible during a videoconference, the board noted that, were the patent proprietor to submit further auxiliary requests, this could be accommodated by email filing, using a dedicated email address, during the videoconference.
In T 758/20 the board recalled that the software used for the videoconferences allowed for screen sharing with all participants. It was thus possible to display figures and even handmade sketches (which had to be scanned in advance) and share them with all participants of oral proceedings. When screensharing, it was furthermore possible to point to details of the shared view using the mouse pointer.