UPC CFI, CD Munich, 24 February 2026: on realsitic starting points and ignoring interdependencies in a claim
04-05-2026 Print this page
Revocation action dismissed (Article 65 UPCA).
Inventive step (Article 56 EPC).
A realistic starting point, in the opinion of the Court, is typically a prior art disclosure as a whole. Absent a specific reason or pointer in the disclosure itself (or based on common general knowledge) to do so, the selection of a particular example composition as a “starting point”, merely because it happens to come “closest” to the claimed subject matter in terms of structural components bears the risk that such selection itself already involves hindsight.
Where the features of a patent claim, in an interdependent way, even if they are not synergetic in the sense of having a special combination effect, provide a solution to the objective problem, ignoring these interdependencies and dividing the objective problem up into separate problems amounts to hindsight reasoning which is to be avoided in the assessment of inventive step.
