Friday, September 21, 2018 T 525/13 - Generalizing from US provisional application

Cat on Microwave

This opposition appeal illustrates the limitations when claiming priority from a US provisional application. While a 'manual cook button' is considered to be implicitly, yet unambiguously and directly derivable from the US provisional application, the claimed microprocessor was considered to represent a different invention as the US provisional application only described a microcomputer.

(In this case, the Board also considers an alleged substantial procedural violations to be merely "a number of unfortunate events", which was communicated by the Board to the parties earlier:

"... it appears to the Board that the alleged substantial violations are rather to be seen as a number of unfortunate events. It is in particular unfortunate that the opposition division did not react sooner to the special request of the representative of the appellant. On the other hand the Board cannot read from the appellant's letter of 13 December 2012 that if the EPO would not be able to accommodate the representative of the appellant, she would not be able EPO Form 3350 6/7T0525/13-3.5.02 to attend the oral proceedings. It is also unfortunate that the respondent, even though there is no legal obligation to do so, did not forward a copy of its submission of 13 December 2012 directly to the appellant, knowing that the appellant would have to obtain a translation and that it would not be unlikely that the letter was not received by the appellant from the EPO before the Christmas holidays. Finally it is standard practice that examiners do not speak directly with a party in inter partes proceedings and all communication with the EPO goes via the formalities officer.")

Thursday, February 02, 2017 G 1/15 (2) - The decision on partial priority

The Order was already issued by the Enlarged Board in November last year, but the full decision and its reasoning became available only just now. The Enlarged Board considered the EPC priority provisions of Art. 87(1), 88(2)-(3) and 89, Paris Convention Priority and the FICPI Memorandum in detail to come to its decision. The right to claim priority and its effect/ purpose (reason 4) led the Enlarged Board to conclude that a generic claim encompassing alternative subject matter may not be refused partial priority, provided that said alternative subject-matter has been disclosed for the first time, directly, or at least implicitly, unambiguously and in an enabling manner in the priority document. No other substantive conditions or limitations apply in this respect. 

Wednesday, December 09, 2015 T 2477/12 - Priority (yes); Priority application incorporated by reference (no)

The EPO does not like the 'herein incorporated by reference' statement in applications, which is once again made clear in this Board of Appeal decision in which an applicant filed a divisional application without a sequence listing and relied on the fact that the priority document did contain the specified sequences, and that the priority document was referred to in the specification of the divisional as 'herein incorporated by reference'. The Board states that "in view of the degenerate nature of the genetic code, a mere verbal reference to a nucleic acid sequence encoding canine pre-proBMP-7 cannot be regarded as an implicit disclosure of a particular nucleic acid sequence encoding said gene. As far as protein sequences are concerned, a mere verbal reference to an amino acid sequence of canine pre-proBMP-7 does not necessarily disclose a particular amino acid sequence, as more than one such sequence may be known."
The Board cites T 689/90 and T 1497/06 for particular conditions that need to be satisfied to allow the incorporation of subject matter from a cited document. If the applicant would have indicated particular sequences that were presented in the priority application, then the Board might have reached a different conclusion but here the applicant could only rely on a general reference to the priority document, and it did not make it unambiguously clear that the sequences relied on were the ones specifically described in the priority application.

Summary of Facts and Submissions

I. The appeal lies against the decision of the examining division posted on 4 July 2012, whereby European patent application No. 10150052.8 was refused because it did not comply with the requirements laid down in Articles 76(1) and 83 EPC.

Wednesday, July 29, 2015 T 0837/13 - Priority: identical technical problem, identical technical solution

In this opposition appeal, the importance of identity or lack of identity of the technical problem(s) and its solution(s) for validity of priority was discussed, and in particular also to which level. 

Friday, April 24, 2015 T 1437/10 - Pri, pri, priority

This case concerns an appeal against a decision of the Examining Division to refuse European Patent Application 99943715.5. In its decision, the Examining Division reasoned that the right to priority of the present application was invalid and that, as a consequence, the subject-matter of the main and auxiliary request was not novel over the disclosure of document D1, being published within the priority period.

Of interest is that the priority document is a US provisional application which was filed without claims. At issue in the present appeal is whether the description of the priority document provides a right of priority for the present - relatively broad - independent claim, and in particular, whether later sections of the priority document, which provide various details, limit the general concept described in an earlier section of the priority document.

Summary of Facts and Submissions

(...)

IV. Oral proceedings before the board were held on 12 February 2015.

(...)

IX. The appellant essentially argued as follows:

The priority document was disclosing at least two inventions. The first one being the general design rule for an interleaver of any size N as disclosed in section 2 of the priority document. Other inventions were to be seen in the sections dealing with the details and with the optimisation of the general design rule as disclosed in section 4 and 5 of the priority document, respectively. In section 2 of the priority document, it was explicitly stated that sections 4 and 5 merely were disclosing the details and the optimisation of the broader invention of section 2. Thus, a separate right to priority was existing for the general interleaver design rule of section 2 of the priority document. Hence, claim 1 according to the main request was entitled to the right of priority.