Zusammenfassung von EPC2000 Art 056 für die Entscheidung T1158/17 vom 12.12.2022

In T 1158/17 the invention concerned a system for secure delivery of business mailings, for example contracts or invoices. The board was not convinced by the contested decision's finding that the claimed components were not technical because they modelled the roles of humans interacting within the framework of the administrative postal scheme. The board considered that a similarity to a business or administrative solution was not a sufficient reason for denying a technical contribution of a claim feature applied in a technical context and involving technical considerations. Put another way, technical considerations in the technical context could not be negated merely on the basis of a non- technical analogy. The board disagreed with the contested decision, according to which at the high level of abstraction at which they were claimed and disclosed in the application, the claimed components modelled the roles of groups of persons interacting within the framework of the administrative postal scheme. The board illustrated the insufficiency of such reasoning by looking at the following example. The analogy to a post office, essentially invoked by the contested decision, is used in technical literature in order to describe functionality of the transport layer (layer 4) of the OSI model. However, in the board's view, it would not be sound to assert, only based on this analogy, that communication protocols implementing this layer's functionality lack technical character.