EPO Decision

This recent decision from an EPO Board of Appeal is a rather satisfying development in how patentability (especially novelty) of purity claims is assessed at the EPO.  This case may be seen as…

The European Patent Office ‘will consider possible next actions’ together with the EPO Member States after a high-profile decision of a Board of Appeal earlier this week, concerning the patentability…

Plants which are produced according to essentially biological processes need to be held patentable, despite EPO Guidelines which were introduced in 2017 to exclude them from patentability. The EPO…

T0969/14 is the latest in a long line of decisions which make it clear that the EPO Boards of appeal will not accept late filed requests which could have been filed in first instance proceedings,…

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…

The Board of Appeal decided that the invention was not sufficiently disclosed, as no seeds had been deposited and a skilled person could not obtain the claimed plants on the basis of the information…