Following the issuance of G 2/21 last year, we asked whether the plausibility elephant had left the room. Our Kluwer colleague and friend Miquel Montañá discussed this issue more recently here. Several decisions have meanwhile been issued applying the new “test” in G2/21, the lucidity of which may have reminded readers of the oracle of…
In decision T 438/19 Technical Board of Appeal 3.3.03 has ex officio (!) referred three questions of law to the Enlarged Board of Appeal (now handled as G 1/23) in order to resolve a perceived divergence in the case law. These questions concern the question whether and in how far a (commercial) product and technical…
The EPO has opened its public user consultation on the latest version of the EPC and PCT-EPO Guidelines, which will come into force on 1 March 2023. Users are invited to submit their comments in any of the EPO’s three official languages via an online form by 4 April 2023. The Guidelines for Examination in…
Six months after ILOAT judgment No. 4551, ruling that measures restricting mass emails at the European Patent Office were contrary to the freedom of communication and must be set aside, the EPO management has failed to execute the judgment and has tried to restrict mass emails in other ways. The Central Staff Committee (CSC) of…
Staff members of the European Patent Office will demonstrate in front of the Isar building in Munich during the meeting of the Administrative Council on 29 June 2022, where re-election of president António Campinos will be discussed. The demonstration has been organised by trade union Suepo. According to an announcement distributed among Suepo members, Campinos was…
Ahead of their meeting late June, a petition calling for a conference of ministers of contracting states under Article 4a EPC has been sent to the members of the Administrative Council of the EPO. The petition is an initiative of the EPO’s trade union SUEPO, which has invited all staff members to sign it. According…
The EPO violated the fundamental right of free association of its staff in 2014 by giving (former) president Benoit Battistelli the power to determine the detailed conditions relating to the staff committee elections. The Administrative Tribunal of the International Labour Organization (ILOAT) has ruled this in its judgment 4482, which was published after its 133d…
In its much-awaited decision in case G 1/21, the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) of the EPO has evaded to answer the high-profile question whether videoconferencing against the will of (one of) the parties is compatible with the right to oral proceedings. Last March (case T 1807/15), a technical board of the EPO had referred the…
Eight years (!) after complaints of dozens of EPO staff members against the way they were treated after having participated in strikes, a final decision in their cases is finally there: former EPO president Benoit Battistelli abused his power in various ways when and after implementing new rules in July 2013 to restrict the rights…
Last year, the European Patent Office changed the publication schedule of the Guidelines as part of its Strategic Plan 2023 which meant there was no update to the Guidelines in 2020. The changed schedule also made room for public consultation to enable increased stakeholder involvement. The first such public consultation ran for six weeks and…
