Friday, March 31, 2017 T 545/08 - A lecture: internet disclosures and balance of probabilties

Subject of this appeal is the date of public availability of an internet disclosure and whether the Examining Division should have allowed evidence with respect to the publication date of this disclosure into the proceedings. Although the Board describes somewhere in its decision that the Boards of Appeal of have a huge backlog, this Board spent quite some time on writing a nice "lesson" on determining the date of availability to the public of internet disclosures and how the balance of probabilities must be applied in those cases. Of course, the Board has to provide a well-reasoned decision - somehow I have the feeling that the lesson is also written for the Examining Division because it seems that the Board was not completely happy with their work.

Sunday, February 12, 2017 T 1440/09 - Public availability of document submitted for standardisation

In the past several discussions took place whether or not documents submitted to a standardisation organisation were public. After submitting the document to the standardisation organisation, the applicant put the document on the Internet, and only then was a patent application filed. The Board had the impression that the applicant thought that since the submission to the standardisation organisation was to be regarded as confidential, that this gave protection for a later submission of the patent application (a form of priority). The Board destroyed this dream.