W. Guidelines for Examination in the European Patent Office
Overview
W. Guidelines for Examination in the European Patent Office
In accordance with Art. 10(2)(a) EPC, the President of the EPO adopted, effective as at 1 June 1978, the Guidelines for Examination in the EPO. Since the decision of the President dated 28 July 2015 the Guidelines have been amended pursuant to Art. 10(2) EPC in accordance with the policy of revising them annually. The latest version of the Guidelines is the April 2025 edition. There is now greater user involvement in drafting new editions. The section of the EPO website devoted to the Guidelines presents the steps in their revision cycle, along with useful documentation on the topic that has likewise been made available online. The revised April 2025 edition of the Guidelines entered into force on 1 April 2025 and supersedes the March 2024 edition. It is available online at www.epo.org. Notices giving general information about the changes made in each revision round are published in the OJ: for the November 2015 version, in OJ 2015, A74; for the November 2016 version (the last version published as a hard copy), in OJ 2016, A76; for the November 2017 version, in OJ 2017, A75; for the November 2018 version, in OJ 2018, A73; for the November 2019 version, in OJ 2019, A80; for the March 2021 version, in OJ 2021, A6; for the March 2022 version, in OJ 2022, A10; for the March 2023 version, in OJ 2023, A6; for the March 2024 version, in OJ 2024, A9; and for the April 2025 version, in OJ 2025, A4. Please note that the Guidelines do not constitute legal provisions. For the ultimate authority on practice at the EPO it is necessary to refer firstly to the EPC itself, including the Implementing Regulations, and secondly to the interpretation put upon the EPC by the boards of appeal and the Enlarged Board (Guidelines General Part, 3 – April 2025 version). With the exception of important aspects relating to interlocutory revision, the appeals procedure is not dealt with in the Guidelines (Guidelines General Part, 5 – April 2025 version).
Article 20(2) RPBA (OJ 2019, A63, unchanged in the consolidated version in OJ 2024, A15), just like Art. 20(2) RPBA 2007 before it, stipulates that: "If, in its decision, a Board gives a different interpretation of the Convention to that provided for in the Guidelines, it shall state the grounds for its action if it considers that this decision will be more readily understood in the light of such grounds."
It should be borne in mind that the edition of the Guidelines referred to in the following abstracts of board decisions is that applied by the board in question and may have been worded differently from the April 2025 version. The various different editions of the Guidelines are archived at epo.org/en/legal/guidelines/archive.