c) Examples of cases where the combination was held to be allowable

In T 1241/03 the board came to the conclusion that claims to formulations comprising compounds in specific concentrations did not need to have a literal basis in a single passage of the application as originally filed, as long as the exact concentrations and ranges claimed for the specific substances were disclosed as such in the original application. The claims at issue did not refer to a "patchwork" of parameters disclosed in non-connected parts of the description, nor had specific values been isolated from examples in a non-allowable way.

In T 330/05 the board considered that the only feature added to the explicit disclosure, namely the concretisation of the polymer material, did not require any "selection" because each of the polymers listed on pages 14 -16 was clearly and unambiguously disclosed as an appropriate alternative material.

In T 2514/16 the board considered whether the two amendments were directly and unambiguously derivable in combination from the original application. In its conclusion, it noted that the two amendments amounted to a limitation of a feature that had already been present in original claim 2, with both features characterising the salt that was necessarily used in the claimed method (contrast with T 1115/14). In these circumstances, the amendments were not to be considered a combination of features from different embodiments that had been combined to artificially construct a new embodiment. Instead, they were a limitation of both the definition and the amount of the base salt stated in original claim 2.

In T 933/18 the board agreed with the opposition division that solely a selection of "10 μg or less" from a single list was required for selecting the disputed feature combination. The disputed feature combination was therefore directly and unambiguously disclosed in the application as filed.