A board of appeal of the EPO held that for the problem-solution approach to inventive step the requirement of the same “purpose or effect" in the criteria for selecting the closest prior art for a…
An EPO board of appeal observed that a careful opponent that is economically active in the same field as the patentee should search for internal evidence of public prior use before filing an…
An EPO board of appeal expressed its opinion that EBA case law implied that no further use should be made of the three-part “essentiality test” of T 331/87, for deciding whether removal of a feature…
A board of appeal of the European patent office held that a decision to reject an opposition with grounds based on an improperly corrected version of the patent as granted maintains the text used in…
The enlarged board of appeal (EBA) of the European patent office effectively ended the possibility of poisonous priority. The EBA held that entitlement to partial priority may not be refused for a…
Although it did not admit a broader claim 1, an EPO board of appeal allowed an auxiliary request wherein claim 1 as granted was replaced by a combination of independent claims from different first…
The Board of Appeal found that the examining division had committed a substantial procedural violation by raising tentative patentability objections rather than completing an improperly justified…
An EPO board of appeal decided that it had the discretion to admit a late filed document, even though the opposition division had exercised its discretion not to admit the document. In this respect…
The Legal Board of Appeal of the EPO rejected the decision of the examining division that additional claim fees were due at the start of examination for claims added with the response to the…
