Zusammenfassung von Article 069 EPC für die Entscheidung T2027/23 vom 30.06.2025

In T 2027/23 the board identified three major takeaways from G 1/24: First, the wording of the claims forms the "basis" for their interpretation and the description and the drawings should always be "consulted" or "referred to". However, G 1/24 is silent as to the very purpose of such "consultation" or "reference". In particular, it cannot be inferred from G 1/24 whether the description and the drawings should be "consulted" for the purpose of, for example, deriving "explanatory aids" to claim interpretation (see e.g. UPC_CoA_335/2023, second headnote), confirming the ordinary meaning of a claim feature, determining the function or the purpose of a claim feature, or simply defining the technically skilled reader of a claim (see e.g. T 1924/20). Second, discrepancies in claim interpretation practice between national courts, the UPC and the Boards of Appeal are undesirable and should thus be avoided. Third, it is up to a patentee to remedy discrepancies between the description and the claims. In other words, patentees are the masters of their fate. Moreover, the board stated that it found no authority for interpreting a claim more narrowly than the wording of the claim as understood by the person skilled in the art would allow, and that this was for several reasons: The board referred to decisions from the UPC and the German Federal Court of Justice and concluded that to align the judicial practice of the Boards of Appeal with that of the national courts and the UPC, a claim should not be interpreted, based on features set out in embodiments of an invention, as having a meaning narrower than the wording of the claim as understood by the person skilled in the art. In cases of discrepancy between the claim language and the description, it falls upon the patentee to remedy this incongruence by amending the claim. It is not the task of the Boards of Appeal to reach such alignment by way of interpretative somersaults. In the present case, the board "consulted" the description and drawings to define the technically skilled reader from whose perspective the claim features (d) to (f) were to be interpreted.