Résumé de Article 056 EPC pour la décision T0646/22 du 21.01.2025

In T 646/22, the invention concerned input/output circuits and devices having physically corresponding status indicators. It followed from the conclusions on novelty that claim 1 as granted differed from D7 in that the two status indicators were capable of displaying different statuses and that the second status indicator comprised a transparent or translucent portion which surrounded the terminal opening (feature [1.9]). The parties did not agree whether or not these features provided together a synergistic technical effect over D7. The opponent was of the opinion that the features distinguishing claim 1 from D7 were to be assessed separately as no synergistic technical effect was apparent. It would have been obvious to the skilled person to provide an additional status indicator in D7 to display a second status, if they so desired. The board did not follow the opponent’s argument, mainly because it did not accept the formulated technical problem. The formulation of the technical problem took for a given that the skilled person wished to display a second terminal status of the terminal in D7 and that the only problem was how to do that. However, D7 did not envisage the display of any second status different from the status it already displayed. Hence, it could not be accepted that the only problem the skilled person would be faced with was how to display such a second status. In the board's opinion, in order to arrive at the claimed invention the skilled person when starting from D7 would first have to find a motivation for displaying a second status of the terminal, then to find a way to modify the described light sources such that they were capable of displaying different statuses and would only then have to start contemplating here to place an additional status indicator. The board considered that such activities went beyond what could be considered obvious for the skilled person in the present context. Regarding feature [1.9], the opponent pointed to the description of D7, and argued that it would thus have been obvious for the skilled person to increase the size of given indicators if they wanted to improve visibility from all sides even further. The board did not follow the opponent in this respect, either. The formulated technical problem of improving the visibility of the status indicator was not related to the claimed invention. The board stated that in the so-called "problem-solution-approach", the formulated objective technical problem should be one that corresponds to the technical effect obtained by the features distinguishing the claimed invention from the prior art. In other words, these distinguishing features should provide a technical advantage to the claimed invention that the prior art has not. In the present case, the terminal block of the claimed invention had no curved surface and there was no technical advantage related to the visibility of the status indicators from all sides. The problem of improving the visibility of the status indicators concerned only D7 and the I/O block it described, but was not a problem to be solved which related to any technical effect the distinguishing features provided to the claimed invention with respect to the prior art. The board, hence, found the opponent's argument not convincing. The board proposed the following Catchword: The objective technical problem formulated in the context of the problem-solution approach should stem from a technical effect the distinguishing features provide to the claimed invention with respect to the closest prior art and not from a possible improvement of the prior art itself.