Case Law of the Boards of Appeal

In line with the established case law of the boards of appeal, when investigating inventive step it should be borne in mind that the technical disclosure in a prior art document should be considered in its entirety, as it would be done by a person skilled in the art and that it is not justified arbitrarily to isolate parts of such document from their context in order to derive from them technical information which would be distinct from the integral teaching of the document (T 56/87, OJ 1990, 188; T 768/90, T 223/94, T 115/96, T 717/96, T 414/98). According to T 95/90, different parts of text in a document can be combined if there is nothing to stop the skilled person from doing so.