Home ›

EPO, Boards of Appeal

Boards of Appeal, European Patent Office

T 172/03 - Order management/RICOH

in
Date of the Decision: 
2003-11-27
Catchword: 
  1. The term “state of the art” in Article 54 EPC should, in compliance with the French and German text, be understood as “state of technology”, which in the context of the EPC does not include the state of the art in commerce and business methods. The term “everything” in Article 54(2) EPC is to be understood as concerning such kind of information which is relevant to some field of technology.
  2. From these considerations it follows that anything which is not related to any technological field or field from which, because of its informational character, a skilled person would expect to derive any technically relevant information, does not belong to the state of the art to be considered in the context of Articles 54 and 56, even if it had been made available to the general public before the relevant priority date (see points 8 to 10 of the reasons).

T 38/86

in
Date of the Decision: 
1989-02-14
Headnote: 
A person who is detecting and replacing linguistic expressions which exceed a predetermined understandability level in a list of linguistic expressions using only his skill and judgment is performing mental acts within the meaning of Article 52(2)© EPC. Accordingly, schemes, rules and methods used in performing them are not inventions within the meaning of Article 52(1) EPC. Since according to Article 52(3) EPC patentability is excluded only to the extent to which the patent application relates to subject-matter or activities summarised in Article 52(2) as such, it appears to be the intention of the EPC to permit patenting in those cases in which the invention involves some contribution to the art in a field not excluded from patentability. The use of technical means for carrying out a method for performing mental acts, partly or entirely without human intervention, may, having regard to Article 52(3) EPC, render such a method a technical process or method and therefore an invention within the meaning of Article 52(1) EPC. However, if the technical implementation of such a method is obvious to a person skilled in the technical art, once the steps of the method for performing the mental acts have been defined, so that there is no inventive contribution in a field not excluded from patentability under Article 52(2)© EPC, such method does not involve an inventive step within the meaning of Article 56 EPC. If a claim for an apparatus (here: a text processing system) for carrying out a method does not specify any technical features beyond those already comprised in a claim pertaining to said method and furthermore does not define the apparatus in terms of its physical structure, but only in functional terms corresponding to the steps of said method, the claimed apparatus does not contribute anything more to the art than the method, in spite of the fact that the claim is formulated in a different category. In such a case, if the method is excluded from patentability, so is the apparatus.

T 209/91

in
Date of the Decision: 
1991-05-23
Summary and Comments: 

A claim has to be assessed as a whole. If it makes use of both technical and non-technical means the use of non-technical means does not detract from the technical character of the overall teaching. The EPC does not require that a patentable invention be exclusively or largely of a technical nature, in other words it does not prohibit the patenting of inventions consisting of a mix of technical and non-technical elements.

Syndicate content