Résumé de EPC2000 Art 056 pour la décision T1959/20 du 09.11.2023

In T 1959/20 the invention concerned the automatic deletion of messages in group chats, for example in the context of social networks. In particular, the goal was to implement an "ephemeral group chat", that is, a chat whose messages are automatically deleted when a certain condition is met, for example, when a message has been viewed for a certain amount of time by all recipients. To achieve this, the invention defined a system in which several client devices exchange messages via a central server system. Chat messages entered at a client device are provided to the server, which forwards them to all the intended recipients. When a triggering event occurs (for example, a recipient has viewed the message for the predetermined amount of time), the recipient's client device sends a message ("chat monitoring information") back to the server. Having received chat monitoring information from all the recipients, the server determines that the deletion triggering condition has been met and sends, to the client devices, a message indicating that the message be deleted. The board judged that the feature of deleting all copies of a message after it has been read by all recipients was not based on technical considerations. Nor did it solve a technical problem. Rather, it was a non-technical requirement expressing a user's wish or subjective preference. Indeed, the claim was even more general than this, as it did not specify the content of the deletion trigger information, or the corresponding event. Following the established case law of the Boards of Appeal, non-technical features do not contribute to inventive step but may instead appear in the formulation of the technical problem, in particular as constraints or requirements to be achieved. Accordingly, the board formulated the technical problem as how to implement the requirement of deleting all copies of a chat message based on the occurrence of an event in all client devices, such as the message having been read by all participants. The board recognised that the implementation of non-technical requirements on a technical prior art system might require modifications which, at first glance, appear non-obvious, as there is no technical reason for them in view of the prior art alone. However, since according to the principles of "Comvik" non-technical features cannot contribute to inventive step, the non-technical requirements must be seen as a given, and the skilled person implementing them must make the necessary modifications to the prior art. For these reasons, the board concluded that claim 1 lacked an inventive step over the prior art.