1.3.2 Standpoint of the skilled person

Any amendment can only be made within the limits of what a skilled person would derive directly and unambiguously, using common general knowledge, and seen objectively and relative to the date of filing, from the whole of the documents as filed (G 2/10, "gold standard", see above chapter II.E.1.3.1).

The board in T 1269/06 held that, for the assessment of whether, contrary to Art. 100(c) EPC 1973, the subject-matter of the patent extends beyond the content of the application as filed, the key question is whether the amendments made in the description, or – as in the case at issue – the claims, did indeed provide the skilled person with additional, technically relevant information which was not contained in the original application documents. This cannot be inferred from the fact alone that terms not present in the application documents were subsequently introduced, or from a purely semantic analysis of the contested passages. Instead, the party or department raising the objection must be able to identify clearly the technical teaching as such which has supposedly been added.

In T 99/13 the board recalled, in line with the case law (see T 667/08, T 1269/06, quoted in the decision), that the assessment of the requirements of Art. 123(2) EPC should be done on the same basis as for all other patentability issues (e.g. novelty and inventive step), namely from the standpoint of the skilled person on a technical and reasonable basis avoiding artificial and semantic constructions. The skilled person, reading claim 1 as originally filed from the standpoint of a technician working in the field, would read the broad condition expressed therein with regard to the viscosity measurement, as a condition to be met at the temperature of use of the claimed formulation and would turn to the description to find further information in this respect. See also T 2255/12 which guards against an overly formalistic approach in which more emphasis is given to the literal content of the original application rather than the technical information that it conveys. In the same vein, see T 1690/15, T 195/20 or T 1210/20.

In T 532/20 the board held that a skilled person did not read an application as a linguist would, but rather on the basis of their technical understanding. The application clearly taught the skilled person that a severe voltage drop at the generator terminals caused high currents in the generator windings, which could damage the semiconductor switches in the inverter. If this happened, the generator could not remain connected and synchronised. The original application did not contain a single technically useful piece of information as to how a severe voltage drop could be accommodated otherwise than with a protective circuit. It also did not contain a single piece of credible disclosure of conditions under which a low-voltage event would not cause excess currents in the generator. In view of this, a skilled person saw beyond the respondent's strategic choice to represent most parts of the disclosure as optional. In this context, it was simply irrelevant how often the words "in one embodiment" were used correctly or not.

It is established case law that literal support for amendments in a patent application is not required under Art. 123(2) EPC, insofar as the amended or added features reflect the technical information that the skilled person reading the original disclosure would have derived from its content (description, claims and drawings) considered in its entirety (T 1728/12 citing decision T 667/08; see also T 1731/07, T 45/12, T 801/13, T 1717/13 and T 640/14). See also in this chapter II.E.1.3.3 "Implicit disclosure" below.

Also, the structure of the claims should not be disproportionately considered in detriment of what was really disclosed to the skilled person (T 1854/22 citing T 2619/11; see also T 342/22). Rather than to a philologist or logician, an application is directed to a technical audience for which an attempt to derive information from the structure of dependent claims would lead to an artificial result (T 2619/11, cited in T 1194/15). T 1363/12 considered that T 2619/11 did not lay down a new test (namely, of what was "really disclosed" to the skilled person) different from the "gold standard" (see in this chapter II.E.1.3.1) (see also T 938/11).

In T 113/16 the board recalled (with reference to the CLB, 8th edn. 2016, II.A.6.1) that in interpreting claims, in order to determine their content, the skilled person read them with synthetic propensity, building up rather than tearing down – with the aim of making technical sense of their wording and in a way that takes account of the whole disclosure of the patent. Claims are thus read with a mind willing to understand, contextually, and using normal reading skills. The same naturally applied to the description and drawings, bearing in mind their purpose to describe or illustrate by detailed examples the basic concept of an invention claimed. Thus, the skilled person approaches claims, description and drawings as integral and connected parts of a whole disclosure. This applied also to determining the contents of the application as filed. See also T 488/16 and T 516/18. However, see T 916/15, in which the board took the view that the jurisprudence of the boards of appeal referring to "a mind willing to understand" did not apply for the purpose of assessing the allowability of amendments under Art. 123(2) EPC.

A new definition differing from the standard definition known by the skilled person does not add subject-matter, if there is pertinent disclosure in the application as a whole (T 1598/18).

In T 367/20 the board held that to assess amendments under Art. 123(2) EPC, the claimed subject-matter first had to be determined by interpreting the claim (i.e. establishing the meaning of the claimed features) from the perspective of the person skilled in the art. In a second step, it then had to be assessed whether that subject-matter was disclosed in the application as filed.