Friday, March 02, 2018 R 3/16 - Do not frighten the Board of Appeal

This is a petition for review against a decision of a Board of Appeal rejecting the opposition of an opponent in an opposition case. During opposition the opponent requested replacement of the members of the division based on a suspicion of partiality. This request was rejected by the opposition division. 

The opponent then filed an appeal together with (late) new documents in which he made many new harsh requests. According to some of those requests  (a) the Board should have remitted the case to the opposition division without oral proceeding and before a different composition of the division, (b) the Board should have excluded a rapporteur of the Board from the proceedings because of his alleged incompetence (c) the Board should have been enlarged by a legally qualified member acquainted with the right to be heard issue ...(g) oral proceedings should have been held public such that members of the public could have witnessed the correctness of handling of the proceedings by the Board.

The Board considered request (a) inadmissible. The opponent/appellant insisted on request (a) and indicated that if request (a) was not fulfilled, a petition for review on the ground of procedural violation would have been risen. The appellant even filed to the Board a document describing the skills required by a technically qualified member of the Board of Appeal to show to the Board that the rapporteur objected did not qualified for the function, that the conduct of the Board was a disgrace and went on with this line of mistrust reasoning.

A petition for review was finally filed on the grounds of several procedural violations of the opposition division and Board of Appeal.

As one may expect the Enlarged Board found the conduct of the petitioner quite disrespectful and discarded the petition as clearly unallowable.   

Friday, July 10, 2015 T 698/10: Problem not mentioned in closest prior art

The closest prior art and the objective technical problem were disputed because the closest prior art does not mention the problem of the claimed invention. This appeal lies from a decision of the Examining Division to refuse a patent for an invention that relates to the Audio Video Coding Standard of China (AVS). The Board of Appeal clearly discusses the inventive step of the invention. In this discussion the above mentioned objections of the Appellant (Applicant) are discussed extensively. The Applicant also considered his right to be heard violated. The Board also provides a clear discussion of this subject at the end of the decision.