Zusammenfassung von Article 069 EPC für die Entscheidung T2047/23 vom 23.10.2025

In T 2047/23 the opposed patent concerned a hearing aid provided with an antenna to enable wireless communication with other devices. Concerning the construction of the term "plane" used in claim 1 of the main request and of auxiliary request 13, there was, in the board's view and contrary to what the appellant (patent proprietor) suggested, no objective reason to restrict the interpretation of this term to a purely physical plane. Thus, several constructions of claim 1 would objectively occur to a skilled reader, including: a) the construction adopted by the opposition division in the appealed decision, involving mathematical "planes", and b) the appellant's preferred so-called "practical implementation" scenario where "planes" were defined by antenna segments. The appellant argued that G 1/24 mandated that the description and drawings had to be referred to when interpreting a claim, which would thus lead the skilled person naturally to the appellant's "practical implementation" scenario. The board did not find this argument persuasive. Decision G 1/24 indeed required that the description and drawings be "consulted" or "referred to", but not that the scope of the claimed subject-matter be limited to the embodiments described therein. As confirmed in, for instance, T 1465/23, the description could, for example, be consulted to define the skilled reader, but this did not preclude interpreting claim terms according to their common meaning in that field, nor did it invalidate broader, technically viable interpretations. Therefore, the "abstract, mathematical" construction remained an equally valid interpretation of the claim's language, even after "consulting" the description and the drawings. In addition, the board found the appellant's reliance on T 190/99 to be misplaced. That decision concerned ruling out interpretations that were "illogical or which do not make technical sense" (cf. T 10/22). The "abstract, mathematical" interpretation was neither; it was rather a standard method of geometric definitions in engineering. The appellant's reference to the UPC decision of the Local Division Dusseldorf UPC_CFI_373/2023 was, if anything, counter-productive to its case, as Headnote 1 of that decision explicitly stated: "The claim must not be limited to the scope of preferred embodiments", which was precisely what the appellant's "practical implementation" scenario sought to do. The appellant also argued that the board had to choose one interpretation, given that the two interpretations set out above could not co-exist. The board was not convinced by this argument, either. It stated that the appellant's premise that a deciding body had to choose a single "correct" interpretation was flawed from the outset. Instead, the deciding body's duty was to assess a claim against all interpretations that were technically sensible to the skilled reader. The board was aware that other decisions, such as T 367/20, had suggested that a deciding body must choose a single "correct" interpretation where mutually exclusive interpretations exist. Yet, in line with its established jurisprudence (cf. T 405/24), the board found that the decisive criterion in this regard was what the reader skilled in the respective technical field would understand from the technical terms of a claim. As explained in T 405/24, an approach that forces a choice for a single "correct" interpretation, such as the one derivable from the description, would jeopardise legal certainty. Such an approach could lead to the untenable result that some provisions of the EPC, such as Art. 123(2) EPC, might be rendered ineffective. The board thus held that all technically reasonable interpretations were to be taken into account instead. In the present case, where both a broad (abstract) and a narrow (practical) interpretation of claim 1 were technically reasonable, the allowability of this claim had to be assessed also against the broader one. In that regard, the board did not accept that the "abstract, mathematical" construction was technically meaningless. The board was also unconvinced by the appellant's arguments based on the specific description. Therefore, the board concluded that the appellant's argument that the term "plane" in the context of claim 1 could only be understood as a "physical plane" had to fail.