T 0545/24 - New grounds held inadmissible by OD

Key points

• The OD decided to hold inadmissible a late-filed ground of opposition (or, more precisely, a new objection that introduced a new ground of opposition), namely insufficient disclosure (Art. 100(b) EPC). Can the Board review this decision? (in view of G 10/91)
• "It is however also established case law that this exercise of discretion by the opposition division is reviewed by the boards and may be overturned only if it is concluded that the opposition division exercised its discretion according to the wrong principles, or without taking into account the right principles, or in an unreasonable way (CLB, IV.C.4.5.2a, V.A.3.4.4)."
• "the opposition division, when deciding, clearly applied the correct principle, which requires that the late-filed ground must prima facie seem to prejudice the maintenance of the patent as granted.
• The minutes of the oral proceedings before the opposition division, page 1 show that, having discussed this issue with the parties, the opposition division reasonably concluded, as set out in the impugned decision, point II.3, last paragraph, that "Even without any further explanations the person skilled in the art would have no problem in realizing a manual replacement of a worn cutting blade by a new cutting blade". 

• Hence, the OD's decision is not overturned.

• The proprietor gave no consent to introducing the attack as a fresh ground of opposition in appeal. Hence, the Board cannot introduce the attack (notwithstanding Art. 12(4) RPBA).

• See e.g. T 0339/18 on the same topic: "it was sufficient for the board to establish that there was evidence that the opposition division had actually examined whether the ground was prima facie relevant and given reasons for its finding on this"
• The OD had maintained the patent as granted. The Board finds the claims as granted to lack basis in the application as filed. The same applies to AR-1 to 5.  
• The proprietor filed a new AR-6 (in reply to the SoG). AR-6 is admitted by the Board. 
• The opponent filed new prior art (with the SoG), which is also admitted. In particular: " The board therefore decides to admit documents D7 to D9 into the appeal proceedings as a matter of fairness to the appellant in view of the admission of the respondent's sixth auxiliary request into the proceedings (Article 13(3) RPBA). "
• The Board remits the case. 
• Question to readers: can the debate on Article 100(b) be reopened in connection with AR-6? Or is the OD's decision on Art.83 / 100(b) now res iudicata after the remittal?

EPO 

T 0964/24 - Inventive polymorphs

Key points

•  This decision deals with novelty, namely a "counting to two" case, and inventive step of polymorphs.
• Claim 1 of the main request is directed to the citrate salt of the compound SCY-078. Novelty over D6 is at issue.
• The Board: "As set out above, claim 49 of D6 relates both to SCY-078 in its free-base form and to a pharmaceutically acceptable salt thereof. Furthermore, the passage quoted above [column 21, line 54 to column 22, line 21]  discloses citrate as a pharmaceutically acceptable salt. The board acknowledges that this disclosure is not made specifically in the context of SCY-078, but rather in relation to all the compounds of the invention of D6. However, since SCY-078 is one of those compounds, the skilled person would already derive directly and unambiguously from this disclosure that citrate also applies to SCY-078. "
• The passage is a list of pharmaceutically acceptable salts and includes citrate.
• Hence, citrate is one selection; a question is whether claim 49 / SCY-078 is a second selection, or at least the embodiment "pharmaceutically acceptable salt" of claim 49. 
• "even if one were to accept the respondent's [proprietor's] rather formal approach that, in addition to selecting citrate from the passage quoted above, a pharmaceutically acceptable salt of SCY-078 must be selected from claim 49 instead of the free base of SCY-078, D6 provides a clear technical link between these selections. Accordingly, D6 directly and unambiguously discloses SCY-078 citrate as defined in claim 1 of the main request."
• Claim 1 of the AR recites 10 crystalline forms of the citrate salts, each defined by an XRD pattern. Inventive step is at issue.
• "At the oral proceedings, the appellant [opponent] considered, inter alia, D6 as possible closest prior art. [The opponent] stated that it regarded the pharmaceutically acceptable salt of SCY-078 disclosed in claim 49 as the starting point for assessing inventive step. However, it did not start from the citrate of SCY-078 as disclosed in D6 (see assessment of main request above). To the benefit of the appellant [opponent] [*], it is assumed in the following that this is correct."
• *  see below, the selection of "citrate" is considered as the distinguishing feature that provides for inventive step. How this is to be reconciled with the Board's conclusion of lack of novelty of that feature in connection with the Main Request, and with Article 114(1) EPC in that respect, is not entirely clear to me.
• "table 18 of the application as filed shows that the Type A citrate crystal form exhibits superior kinetic solubility in fasted state simulated intestinal fluid (FaSSIF) and in fed state simulated intestinal fluid (FeSSIF) compared with other salts of SCY-078 (hippurate, fumarate, mesylate, phosphate). "
• "none of the documents in the proceedings teaches the use of citrate in order to increase bioavailability of a drug relative to other salt-forming options."
• The claims are held to be inventive. 

EPO 

The link to the decision is provided after the jump.

T 1174/24 - Correction unclear identity of opponent

Key points

• The opposition is filed in the name of   SPG GmbH & Co. KG" without giving an address.
• It turns out there are three legal entities with the same name (in Germany).
• Hence, the identity of the opponent is unclear (at the end of the opposition period).
• The opposition is therefore, in principle, inadmissible  (Rule 77(1)). 
• The Board allows a correction under Rule 139, however (as did the OD).
• " There is no plausible reason why the appellant would have intentionally omitted the address in the notice of opposition, thereby failing to provide a requirement for the admissibility of the opposition and thus incurring the risk of an inadmissible opposition. Furthermore, the authorized representatives would have had to act knowingly contrary to the EPC by doing so. The respondent's stated possible motivation for omitting the address due to security concerns appears contrived, given that the appellant's address can easily be ascertained from a commercial register extract. In this respect, the Board agrees with the Opposition Division's opinion that the probability of this being an oversight, rather than intentional, is already high."
• "The managing director of the appellant's personally liable partner stated in his affidavit, as set forth in Exhibit D24, that he had instructed the appellant's authorized representatives to file an opposition against the patent in suit on behalf of and by order of the appellant. The Board has no reason to doubt the validity of this statement. 
• "This statement is further corroborated by the affidavits of the appellant's two authorized representatives, as set forth in Exhibits D25 and D26, and by the email from the authorized representative dated January 5, 2023, at 10:47 a.m., submitted as Exhibit D22. The Board therefore cannot accept the respondent's objection that the evidence does not clearly establish who the opponent should be. Both authorized representatives also stated in their affidavits that "[t]he lack of further details concerning the person of the opponent pursuant to Rules 76(2)(a) and 41(2)(c) EPC [...] was due to an accidental omission." The Board has no reason to doubt the accuracy of this statement, especially since it confirms the plausible explanation for the omission of the address (see paragraph 2.10.1 above). 
• The OD had rejected the opposition.
• The Board revokes the patent. 

EPO 

The link to the decision is provided after the jump.

T 0698/24 - Disapproval text by proprietor/appellant

Key points

• The proprietor filed an appeal against the decision to revoke the patent.
• "VI. With letter dated 15 May 2026, the appellant declared that they did no longer approve the granted text of the patent, that all requests were thereby withdrawn, including the request for oral proceedings and that they also did not intend to file any other text for amendment of the patent in the present proceedings. "
• Is the appeal fee to be reimbursed in part?
• " The present Board follows the analysis in T 2684/18 and agrees with the second approach. It is established case law that a request for withdrawal of an appeal should only be accepted without question if it is completely unqualified and unambiguous (Case Law of the Boards of Appeal, 11th edition 2025, V.A.7.3.5). If the patent proprietor, instead of withdrawing the appeal (which would involve a partial refund of the appeal fee), does not choose this path but declares a non-approval of the text of the patent in any form, this is in the view of the Board a deliberate choice and can thus not be interpreted as an unambiguous withdrawal of the appeal. "
• The patent is revoked without oral proceedings.

EPO 

The link to the decision is provided after the jump.

T 0847/24 - (II) Schrodinger's method claim

Key points

• The post title is not meant as criticism of the Board's decision. 
• Claim 1 as granted describes, in effect, a preparation method that yields product A. The description discloses an additional step of converting A into B. The proprietor wishes to amend claim 1 by adding that step of converting A into B. Is this permitted?
• In the case at hand, A is a digital design of an implant and B is the physical implant, but that should not distract us.
• The Board agrees that claim 1 as amended "confers protection not only to the claimed method but also, pursuant to Article 64(2) EPC, to the implant directly obtained by that method, i.e. to a physical implant produced in accordance with the method defined in claim 1 of auxiliary request 1."
• The issue is Art. 123(3).
• "the Board also agrees, that a method comprising all the steps of claim 1 as granted and, in addition, a step of producing the implant also falls within the scope of claim 1 as granted, even though claim 1 as granted does not comprise any production step. This is because the added production step merely limits the method defined in claim 1 as granted."
• "carrying out the method of claim 1 as granted results only in the configuration of an implant, i.e. in data defining such a configured implant. It does not result in a physical implant. The appellant [proprietor] argued that, since a method including an additional production step fell within the scope of claim 1 as granted, the product directly obtained by that more limited method was also covered by the protection conferred by claim 1 as granted, by virtue of Article 64(2) EPC. "

• "The Board does not consider this persuasive. Pursuant to Article 64(2) EPC, if the subject-matter of the patent is a process, the protection conferred by the patent extends to products directly obtained by such a process. This provision therefore requires that the product in question be "directly" obtained by the claimed method. The Board understands this to mean that the protection conferred by a process claim does not, as a rule, extend to products obtained only by carrying out further steps which are neither defined in that claim nor implied by it."

• "The product protection conferred by Article 64(2) EPC is different from, and additional to, the protection conferred by a process claim as such. Hence, if a part of the patent's scope of protection is, in view of Article 64(2) EPC, extended because of the amendment, Article 123(3) EPC is infringed. In such a situation, it does not matter whether the patent's scope of protection is partly also, with regard to the process claim as such, more limited than before the amendment. Generally speaking, this is comparable to how an aliud partly extending and partly limiting the scope of protection also infringes Article 123(3) EPC."

• 6.7 Hence, if a granted claim defines [a method of making product A], amending the claim such that it additionally includes the step of [converting A into B] in view of Article 64(2) EPC, not allowable under Article 123(3) EPC." (generalisation in square brackets is mine).

• I don't know if this point has been decided before. The amendment of adding a method step to a preparation step does not seem very unusual to me.

• The background is that Article 64(2) EPC codifies a judicial stopgap from German case law to prevent imports of chemical compounds from Switzerland at a time when German patent law did not allow product claims for chemical products (and claims for the preparation method were used instead). (see, generally, Uhrich, Stoffschutz, 2010). The exclusion of chemical products from patentability in turn was a lesson learned from an early French case about a patent with a product claim for a dye, fuchsine (see e.g. here; and this article, p.19 of the PDF) 

• 
  

EPO 

The link to the decision is provided after the jump.

T 0772/24 - Analysable properties for inventive step

Key points

• My big post on G 1/23 is still a work in progress.
• G 1/23 said that: "It also follows from the correct interpretation of G 1/92 that all analysable properties of the product put on the market will belong to the state of the art, i.e. they will represent technical information that the skilled person is aware of and will consider relying on when looking at technical solutions."
• The present case is admittedly not about commercial products as prior art, but still.
• "there is nothing in D11 [a patent application] that suggests that the three primer coatings disclosed therein would perform differently in terms of adhesion to a coating applied thereto. Fully in agreement with this, the coatings according to D11 are only assessed in terms of their non-fouling properties in the example section; they are not assessed with respect to their adhesion to underlying surfaces or coatings. Accordingly, while experiments testing these three primers for a given property such as adhesion might have been routine for the skilled person, the fact remains that there is no incentive to be found in D11 to perform this testing. The targeted testing and comparison of these primers with respect to their adhesion to a coating applied thereto in order to determine which primer performs best in this regard, would not have been obvious, contrary to the appellant's argument. In other words, on the basis of D11 alone, the skilled person would not have had a reasonable expectation that an epoxy primer would have solved the objective technical problem."
See also G 1/92: "The chemical composition of a product is state of the art when the product as such is available to the public and can be analysed and reproduced by the skilled person, irrespective of whether or not particular reasons can be identified for analysing the composition."

EPO 

The link to the decision is provided after the jump.

J 0006/23 - Non-existent proprietor

Key points

• In J 12/19,  the patentee went bankrupt during the first instance opposition proceedings and the proceedings were interrupted under Rule 142(1)(b). After some time, the Legal Division announces the intention to resume the proceedings under Rule 142(2). The opponent disagrees, arguing that the insolvency proceedings were terminated by the patentee's dissolution, which is now non-existent. The opponent submits accordingly to the Legal Division. The Legal Division is of the opinion that the opponent is not a party to the proceedings in this respect, disregards the opponent's submissions, and issues a Communication to the opponent stating so. The opponent then files an appeal."
• That decision of the Legal Board of Appeal was issued on 28.04.2021. 
• The Legal Division took a new decision almost two years later, issued on 01.02.2023. That decision was: "rejecting the opponent's request that opposition proceedings be resumed pursuant to Rule 142 EPC with the opponent as the sole party. " The LD intended to resume the procedure with the proprietor as a party. 
• The opponent appealed. The Legal Board issued the present decision on 05.06.2023.
• Meanwhile, the patent has lapsed in all states. 
• On the admissibility of the appeal: "the refusal in the decision under appeal to intend resumption with the opponent alone has no immediate legal consequence either. However, it creates the threat that the LD will proceed to set a date for resumption with the proprietor as well. The opponent strongly disagreeing with the latter way to proceed, it would be required to appeal such a future decision. Due to this threat, a legitimate interest in the present appeal cannot be denied."
• I don't know whether this requirement for a legitimate interest is additional to Article 106 and 107 EPC, or whether it is a way to test "adversely affected" (or "decision")
• At issue is the (releatively new) second sentence of Rule 142(2) EPC: "If, three years after the publication of the date of interruption in the European Patent Bulletin, the European Patent Office has not been informed of the identity of the person authorised to continue the proceedings, it may set a date on which it intends to resume the proceedings of its own motion."
• The LBA clarifies that "intends" should be read as: the EPO may set a date on which the proceedings are resumed.
•  " on the basis of the capacities that Transito NV has under Belgian law, it must be concluded that it fails both prongs of the "legal personality" test of G 3/99."
• G 3/99 r.9: "The legal personality of a named entity under the EPC is decided on the same basis as before national courts, namely the capacity to sue or to be sued in its own name and on its own account." (hello DABUS, by the way, see here)
• "It follows that Transito NV no longer exist under Belgian law."
• "It is a generally recognized principle of national law and also under the EPC that legal entities which do not exist cannot bring or take part in proceedings. Transito N.V. is thus not able to take part in resumed opposition proceedings. 
• "The only way to reconcile the spirit of Rule 142(2), 2nd sentence, EPC, which aims to avoid endless interruptions of proceedings in cases where no person authorized to represent the affected party can be identified, with the aforementioned principle that legal entities which do not exist cannot take part in proceedings, appears to be a resumption of the proceedings without the affected party. 
• "The Legal Board concluded above that, if the present opposition proceedings are to be continued, then they must be continued with the opponent only. The Board must therefore set aside the LD's decision expressing the view that the proceedings are to be continued with both the opponent and the registered patent proprietor Transito NV that has ceased to exist.

  It will be for the LD to exercise its discretion pursuant to Rule 142(2), second sentence, EPC in respect of a possible resumption of the opposition proceedings. If the LD exercises its discretion by resuming the proceedings, then the proceedings will take place with the opponent only until the opposition division in turn subsequently exercises its discretion pursuant to Rule 84(1) EPC. If the opposition division does so by maintaining the continuation of those proceedings, then the opposition division will be bound by the LD's decision to continue them with the opponent only."

• I don't think the LD can arbitrarily keep the procedure interrupted, but we may have to see if the opponent has to appeal on that point as well. 

• I assume the opponent has requested that the proceedings be continued under Rule 84. We will have to see if the OD accedes to this request, or if the opponent will have to file an appeal on that point as well. 

EPO 

The link to the decision is provided after the jump.