Tuesday, May 15, 2018 T 0802/13 - (Un)disclosed combination of features?

This case concerns a successful appeal of a patent proprietor against a decision of the Opposition Division to revoke a patent on the ground of added subject matter.

In the Opposition Division's view, claim 1 of the main request lacked features of the embodiments disclosed in the application as filed in combination with the features added to amended claim 1.

In the BoA's view (see also GL(2017), H-V, 3.2.1), the skilled person is presented with additional technical information if only some of the features of an originally disclosed combination of "inextricably linked" technical features are extracted.This is the case if the original disclosure conveyed the teaching, explicit or implicit, that all the features of that combination had to be present together in order for a specific technical effect to be obtained. In such a situation, claiming only some of those features would present the skilled person with the different (additional) technical information that the omitted features were optional for that specific technical effect (reason 4.3, last paragraph, of the present decision).

However, this was not found to be the case here essentially because those non-claimed  features of the embodiments disclosed were considered to contribute to technical effects different from the technical effect derivable from original claim 1 (and application as originally filed). The BoA considered those non-claimed features exemplary rather than limitative for achieving the desired technical effect. 

Furthermore, in view of the BoA, both the Opposition Division and the respondent did not clearly distinguish between what is covered by a claim from what is disclosed by a claim. A claim can cover much more than what it discloses, thus also embodiments which are not originally disclosed, but this is irrelevant for the evaluation of added subject matter.