Abstract on EPC2000 Art 084 for the decision T1924/20 of 16.03.2023

In T 1924/20 the board noted that the respondent's (patent proprietor's) line of argumentation regarding E1's disclosure and inventive step concerning claim 8 hinged upon a claim construction that was based on the description of the opposed patent. The board held that such a line of argumentation was not convincing; a skilled reader of a patent claim would, for many reasons, interpret the claims based essentially on their own merits (see e.g. T 2764/19 and T 1127/16). This was because the "subject-matter of the European patent" (cf. Art. 100(a) EPC) is defined by the claims and only by them. The board explained that the description and drawings were, however, typically used by the deciding body to determine the above- mentioned "skilled reader" and, hence, the view point from which the claims are interpreted. This meant that, when interpreting the claims, the description and drawings could not be relied on as a sort of fall-back or supplementary-guidance tool for filling up gaps or for resolving inconsistencies in a claim to the patent proprietor's advantage. Such a reliance on the description and the drawings by the patent proprietor would normally fail to convince. The present case was no exception to this.