EPLAW PATENT BLOG

EPO – Case Law from the Contracting States to the EPC 2011 – 2014

Posted: September 17th, 2015

EPOSummaries of selected national patent law cases in the three official languages

"This edition of the Case Law from the Contracting States to the EPC 2011 – 2014 contains summaries of 99 selected decisions from 11 different EPC contracting states, handed down during that time. They have been selected for their significance regarding substantive patent law, and are arranged according to topic and country of provenance. Aspects of harmonisation, patents subject to dispute in several jurisdictions, as well as some institutional issues were also taken into account in making and presenting it. Decisions referring to the case law of the boards of appeal or engaging with the EPO's approach in a significant way were also included."

Read the summaries here.


5 Responses

  1. Edward T Lentz says:

    This is great! Thank you for preparing this and for making it available.

  2. susie dym says:

    it is not too readable. for one thing, is there a version that has only english (and presumably parallel only-french and only-german versions)?

    • Anie says:

      The decisive quetoisn in this area is: “How much knowledge does the person skilled in the art receive in advance?” – or to put it bluntly – “How smart is the skilled person?” If the technical problem to be solved includes all new rules for the “method of doing business”, the skilled person will rarely have problems to implement the solution, as it is already provided. COMVIK is always quoted, but I think already PBS Pension Benefit System T931/95 paved the way (skilled person has knowledge of the concept of the improved system).Whereas, for other areas the skilled person is not equipped with the required knowledge from the excluded categories in advance, e.g. the whole area of signal or image processing, or the task of designing an optical system, or for an example within the field of computer science, see Microsoft T 424/03. Obviously, there is a different handling of the excluded categories, or, to use the IPKat’s words “Some exclusions are more equal than others”.The issue arising is whether this can be justified, and it seems as the Board likes to refer to the “technical character”. Besides the fact that the meaning doesn’t appear to be well-defined, as the IPKat points out, we should also not forget that the word “technical” does not show up within the 178 articles of the EPC. Is this principle really so implicit that the EPC’s framers forgot to mention it in the Convention and hid it just “implicitly” in the Regulations? Maybe the inequality of the excluded categories is also so “implicit” that the framers didn’t find it necessary to make list them differently…

  3. h5 says:

    An English version is available at http://www.epo.org/law-practice/legal-texts/official-journal/2015/etc/se2.html , click on “view” for each of the chapters.

  4. The same applies to the German text:
    http://www.epo.org/law-practice/legal-texts/official-journal/2015/etc/se2_de.html
    as well as the French version:
    http://www.epo.org/law-practice/legal-texts/official-journal/2015/etc/se2_fr.html
    However, unfortunately there is no single-language-pdf-version available.

Leave a Reply to h5