T 258/03
a decision of the Boards of Appeal of the European Patent Office
T 258/03, also known as Auction Method/Hitachi, is a decision of a Technical Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office (EPO), issued on April 21, 2004. It is a landmark decision for interpreting Article 52(1) and (2) of the European Patent Convention (EPC) which built on the principles suggested by the same Board in T 641/00 (Comvik, Two identities). This decision, amongst others, but notably this one and T 641/00, significantly affected the assessment of an invention’s technical character and inventive step.
It mainly stated that "a method involving technical means [was] an invention within the meaning of Article 52(1) EPC" and in stating so contrasts with T 931/95 (Pension Benefit Systems Partnership), which held that "the mere fact that data processing and computing means, i.e. technical means, [were] recited in a method claim [did] not necessarily confer a technical character to the claimed method". T 258/03 put apparatus and method claims on an equal footing for the patentability examination of Article 52(2) EPC.
In other words, the Board of Appeal in this decision "pointed the way to the new test and argued that the term ‘invention’ in the definition of patentable inventions set out in Article 52(1) of the EPC was merely to be construed as ‘subject matter having technical character’. Thus, the presence of computer hardware in a claim to a business method, providing a technical character, would now be sufficient to overcome the business method objection, regardless of technical contribution."
Reasoning on patentable subject-matter
The invention in the application under examination related to an "automatic Dutch auction method executed in a server computer".
The Board of Appeal first made it clear that:
there are four requirements to be fulfilled for some claimed subject-matter to be patented: "(1) it should be an "invention", and this invention must be (2) new, (3) inventive, and (4) industrially applicable", that
the term "invention" is to be construed as "subject-matter having technical character", and finally that
the "verification that claimed subject-matter is an invention within the meaning of Article 52(1) EPC" must be done before performing the three other tests, i.e. the novelty, the inventive step and the industrial applicability tests.
Consequently, and having regard to the structure of the EPC, the Board held that "it should be possible to determine whether subject-matter is excluded under Article 52(2) EPC without any knowledge of the state of the art (including common general knowledge)".
“T 258/03” enters the record as a decision of the Boards of Appeal of the European Patent Office. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what decision, Boards and Appeal can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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