Zusammenfassung von Article 084 EPC für die Entscheidung T1775/23 vom 08.10.2025

In T 1775/23 the appeal lay from the decision of the examining division to refuse the application for lack of novelty of claim 1 of the main request. The appellant submitted that the examining division had used claim interpretation principles which were not, or at least no longer, correct in view of G 1/24, which decided that the description and drawings should always be consulted for claim interpretation. In its view, the examining division had interpreted the claims "on their own". According to the board, the description itself could indeed be said to support, generally, the interpretation of the appellant. But even the description remained ambiguous. The appellant did not provide passages with clear definitions, and the board did not see any either, of the terms "request that points to a service", "intercepting", or "determining" used in claim 1, to mean what the appellant apparently intended them to mean. This intended meaning could only be gleaned, in the board's view not unambiguously, or at least not exclusively, from the text of the application. The board further stated that, even if the description were clear about the intended meaning of those terms, the relatively large discrepancy between the straightforward interpretation of the wording of the claim (on its own), and the apparent intended meaning would already be a problem of clarity. It is the applicant who chooses the wording of the claim, and it is reasonable to think that the applicant may aim for a broad scope of protection. Thus, if the wording of the claim allows for different, broader interpretations, then the question arises whether matter covered by such broader interpretations is protected or not – which is an issue of clarity (see also T 3097/19). According to G 1/24 the description and drawings are always referred to when interpreting the claims. But, in the board’s view, this does not mean that in all cases definitions or meanings of the terms that may be implied by the description must necessarily be adopted (see also T 1561/23 from the same board in a different composition). Instead, the assessment will depend on the circumstances of the specific case. Furthermore, as also stated in G 1/24 (point 20 of the Reasons), the correct answer to an objection of lack of clarity is, in examination, amendment, in order to remove any ambiguities as to what the intended protection may be. Since the act of interpretation did not lead to a clear understanding as to for which matter protection was sought (see G 1/24, point 17 of the Reasons), the board concluded that claim 1 of the main request lacked clarity (Art. 84 EPC).