6.6. Reproducibility without undue burden

In T 383/14 (sorting table for grape harvest), the board held that a claim was an attempt to define a device in terms of ideal conditions, i.e. those required for its theoretically optimal or nominal operation. However, when considering a claim, the skilled person would readily understand that the conditions of actual operation would not be the ideal ones defined there. Thus, on reading the claim at issue, they would immediately grasp how the table would operate in practice after a harvest and so understand the contested term "only" not in an exclusive sense, but one compatible with the actual operation of all mechanical devices, whose reliability or success rate was always less than 100% and even lower in the specific case of sorting or grading. Thus the board was unconvinced by the opponents' argument that not "only" the grapes passed through the openings because it was unrealistic to expect as much when reproducing sorting; the fact that not only the grapes passed through resulted from an occasional failure entirely to be expected in the case of a sorting device and allowed for by the case law.