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Guidelines for Examination

 
 
Table of Contents - Guidelines for Examination
Part G Patentability
Chapter IV – State of the art
9. Errors in prior art documents
9.
Errors in prior art documents 

Errors may exist in prior art documents. If, using common general knowledge (see G-VII, 3.1), the skilled person can

(i)
see at once that the disclosure of a relevant prior art document contains errors, and 
(ii)
identify what the only possible correction should be, 

then the errors in the disclosure do not affect its relevance as prior art. The document can thus be considered to contain the correction when assessing its relevance to patentability (see T 591/90).

9.1 Incorrect compound records in online databases