23.08.2024
The EPO Enlarged Board of Appeal has now issued its preliminary (and non-binding) opinion on G 1/23. This referral (from the Technical Board of Appeal in T 438/19) seeks to clarify whether a commercially available product, with an undisclosed composition or internal structure, must be analysable and reproducible by the skilled person in order to constitute prior art under Article 54(2) EPC.
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The preliminary opinion on G 1/23 appears to overturn G 1/92, which had previously concluded that for a product to become prior art, the skilled person must be able to determine the composition of the product and then reproduce it without undue burden. Amongst its reasoning in the preliminary opinion, the Enlarged Board on G 1/23 states that G 1/92 “would directly lead to the result that irreproducible products would effectively cease to exist for the purposes of the EPC. The Enlarged Board is of the opinion that such an extreme result could not have been intended by G 1/92”.
Instead, the preliminary opinion on G 1/23 concludes that a product which is put on the market (and is therefore publicly available) is prior art even if the skilled person is unable to analyse and reproduce its composition. Therefore, whereas currently an Applicant may be able to patent a product which had been on the market before filing by arguing that the product was non-reproducible (e.g. due to secret know-how), this will no longer be possible if the Decision that issues on G 1/23 matches the preliminary opinion.
The Enlarged Board has given the EPO President and the parties an opportunity to comment on the preliminary opinion by 16 October 2024, after which a final Decision will be issued. This Decision has the potential to impact the commercialisation and IP strategies of innovators in a wide variety of technical fields. We will keep you updated.
21.09.2023
Deadline approaches for the EPO’s “10-day rule”The “10-day” rule, which determines how the response deadlines to certain European Patent Office (EPO) communications are calculated, is to be abandoned from 1 November 2023.
21.08.2024
Selection inventions in life sciences at the EPOThe EPO practice on selection inventions has developed considerably over the past decade. Two recent decisions of the Technical Board of Appeal are particularly instructive for applicants in the life sciences field. The Guidelines for Examination in the EPO (EPC Guidelines) define selection inventions as those that “deal with the selection of individual elements, subsets, or sub-ranges from a more generic disclosure in the prior art”. The Guidelines address the examination of both novelty and inventive step of selection inventions.
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