b) Results of reflection and imagination of the skilled person 

The board in T 89/00, citing T 260/85 (OJ 1989, 105), T 64/96 and T 415/91, held that, according to the case law of the boards of appeal, a distinction must be made between what the original documents of a patent directly and unambiguously disclosed to a skilled person and what said skilled person on the basis of this disclosure may do upon reflection and using its imagination. The thinking of the skilled person is not part of the content of the original documents of the patent. See also T 553/15, T 1103/23 and T 1693/23.

In T 782/16 the board held that for a correct application of the "gold standard", a distinction needed to be made between subject-matter which was disclosed either implicitly or explicitly in the original (or earlier) application and therefore could be directly derived from it, and subject-matter which was the result of an intellectual process, in particular a complex one, carried out on what was disclosed.

In T 298/22, the board held that, when examining under Art. 123(2) EPC whether a combination of features was originally disclosed, the "gold standard" did not require that the combination of features could possibly be derived by the skilled person from the description, or that the skilled person could derive the claimed combination from alternative embodiments of the disclosure. Rather, the combination had to be directly and unambiguously disclosed. In the present case, neither a direct nor an unambiguous disclosure was present.