4.9. End-values

In T 240/95 the appellant had argued that 0.5 to 60 minutes would not include 60 minutes as such inclusion would have to be worded "0.5 up to and including 60 minutes". The board held that, in accordance with established case law, disclosure of a range was considered to be an explicit disclosure of the end values.

In T 1115/09 D1 disclosed that the gas at the outlet of the catalytic bed contained no more than about 10 ppm oxygen, i.e. a range of oxygen concentrations ending with the upper value of "about 10 ppm". According to the boards' established case law (see T 240/95), the disclosure of a range was an explicit disclosure of the end values. In the case at issue, it followed by analogy that the end value "about 10 ppm" was explicitly disclosed in D1. The question to be answered was whether this end value fell within the range defined in claim 1 at issue, i.e. "more than 10 ppm oxygen and up to 250 ppm". In the board's view, in the absence of a clear definition in document D1 of the relative term "about", the expression "about 10 ppm of oxygen" was to be given its broadest meaning, namely "10 ± epsilon ppm of oxygen". As the value "10+epsilon" was synonymous with the value "more than 10", the choice of the latter as the lower end of the range defined in claim 1 thus boiled down to the selection of one discrete value within the list of three disclosed in D1: "10-epsilon", "10" and "10+epsilon".