UPC CFI, CD Paris, 28 July 2025: Revocation rejected, maintained in amended form
08-11-2025 Print this page
Revocation rejected, patent maintained in amended form (Article 65 UPCA).
Claim construction: patent’s own lexicon (Article 69 EPC). The Court considers that according to the ordinary meaning of the wording in common language as well as in the context of the description and the drawings of the patent, the term “a working surface” is to be interpreted as meaning “one working surface”. In this regard it is worth noting that the term “working surface” does not imply that the surface is planar but can also have other shapes including a folded shape.
No added subject-matter (Article 138(1)(c) EPC). Para. [0041] provides one example, which is shown in figs. 7, 8 and 9, and according to paras. [0049] and [0050] variants and technically equivalent elements to this example may be used. Feature (1.6.3) has a basis in para. [0041] which discloses that “Subsequently, or at the same time as the lateral retraction, the frames 17 and 18 rotate, pushed by the linear actuators 43 and 44, as in Figure 9, in order to face each other as in Figure 10”.
Novelty standard (Article 54(1) EPC). An invention is to be considered part of the state of the art when it is found clearly integrally, directly and unambiguously in one single piece of prior art and it is identical in its constitutive elements, in the same form, with the same arrangement and the same features.
Assessment of inventive step (Article 56 EPC). It is necessary to determine whether, given the state of the art, a person skilled in the art would have obtained the technical solution claimed by the patent using their technical knowledge and carrying out simple operations. Inventive step is defined in terms of the specific problem encountered by the person skilled in the art. It is first necessary to determine one or more teachings in the prior art that would have been of interest to a person skilled in the art who, at the priority date of the patent in suit, was seeking to develop an invention or process similar to that disclosed in the prior art. Then, it must be assessed whether it would have been obvious for the skilled person to arrive at the claimed solution of the underlying technical problem on the basis of a realistic disclosure of the selected prior art.
