a) Consultation of the description and drawings to interpret the claims when assessing patentability under Art. 52 to 57 EPC  

In T 1561/23, the board consulted the description and the drawings when interpreting the claims, in particular the terms "additional function" and "task", as per decision G 1/24 (OJ 2025, A60). It also explained why this consultation could not justify a narrower interpretation of the claim wording. In particular, it considered the fact that the application did not give any definition (or similar information) for the terms at issue, leaving aside the question of whether – or under which circumstances – any such definition would then limit the claimed subject-matter. The application provided examples of additional functions, but this could not establish any specific, fundamental distinction between tasks and additional functions.

In T 1999/23, the term "excitation surface” was defined in a restricting manner in the description. This deviation from the terminology customary in the art was not reflected in the claim. The board noted that in G 1/24 the Enlarged Board had clarified that the description is to be consulted when interpreting claims, but otherwise referred to the principles developed by the case law. One of these principles is that a restrictive definition of a term in the description cannot be used to limit the subject-matter of a claim that the skilled person otherwise unequivocally interprets more broadly. In the board's view, this principle remains valid after G 1/24, since the Enlarged Board had emphasised that the claims are the starting point and basis for the interpretation. The board saw no objective reason for allowing a patent proprietor, when formulating the subject-matter for which protection was sought, to deviate from established technical terminology without any apparent justification and to refer to this only in the description. While there may be objective reasons justifying this in individual cases, the board could not see any in the present case. Resolving this ambiguity to the detriment of the party who created it without an objective reason was in keeping with the principle of legal certainty and with the primacy of the claims as confirmed in G 1/24.

According to the board in T 2027/23, 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. This is for several reasons. First, G 1/24 does not require the boards to give the description preference over the wording of the claim. To the contrary, according to the Order of G 1/24, "the claims are the starting point and the basis for assessing the patentability of an invention", and in line with UPC_CoA_335/2023, the claims are the "decisive basis". Second, such interpretation would contradict the well-established jurisprudence of the boards of appeal, which was essentially confirmed in G 1/24, point 10 of the Reasons. Third, such an interpretation would result in discrepancies in claim interpretation practice between national courts, the UPC and the boards of appeal, which are undesirable and should be avoided. 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. Confirmed, for example, in T 2357/22, T 356/23, T 1993/23 and T 1402/24.

Likewise, in T 1645/22, T 669/23, T 1069/23, T 1211/23, T 1232/23, T 1465/23, T 1505/23, T 1846/23, T 2034/23 and T 2047/23, the boards held that consultation of the description does not mean that restrictive features that are contained in specific embodiments in the description can limit the wording of the claims. In this context, the board noted in T 1505/23 that G 1/24 expressly refers to the principles developed in the case law of the boards of appeal, which remain applicable. One such principle was that the description could not be relied on to read into the claim an implicit restrictive feature not suggested by the explicit wording of the claim.

In T 1849/23, the board took into account the content of the description and construed the claim in a broader manner. The patent disclosed a gyroscope sensor (i.e. a sensor for measuring the yaw rate) as the only specific implementation of the claimed angular rate sensor. Consequently, when consulting the description the claim could not be strictly construed as requiring the measurement of the rate of the angle made by an axis passing through the hitch pivot point with respect to a reference axis under any conditions or movements of the towing vehicle. The claim had to be construed in a broader manner, i.e. as only requiring that said measurement could be made under certain conditions.

The referring board applied the conclusions of the Enlarged Board in G 1/24 to interpret the term "gathered sheet" in T 439/22 of 11 December 2025. The board held that in interpreting the language used in a claim, "consulting", "referring to", "using" and "taking into account" the description and figures were synonyms for the act of deriving the necessary information from the patent as a whole to understand which meaning a person skilled in the art would attribute to the terms used in the claim. The board further stated that claim interpretation was the result of both reading the claims and consulting the description and drawings as a unitary process. This holistic approach followed from the Order of the Enlarged Board, according to which, if, on the one hand "[t]he claims are the starting point and the basis for assessing the patentability of an invention under Art. 52 to 57 EPC", the interpretation of the claims requires, on the other hand, that "[t]he description and drawings shall always be consulted when assessing the patentability of an invention under Art. 52 to 57 EPC". This was also confirmed in point 17 of G 1/24, which provides that "[t]he finding that the language of a claim is clear and unambiguous is an act of interpretation, not a preliminary stage to such an interpretative act." In line with this holistic approach, a person skilled in the art reading the claim in the context of the description and figures would try to take a definition found in the description at face value. As long as the definition was technically reasonable and complied with the overall teaching expressed in the claims, description and figures, the skilled person would read the terms in the claim in the sense of the definition, taking into account both the broadening and limiting aspects found in that definition. Therefore, the board concluded that the main request lacked novelty and that the auxiliary request, in which paragraph [0035] had been deleted from the description of the contested patent, did not comply with the requirement of Art. 123(3) EPC.