Inventive Step Under The European Patent Convention
Under the European Patent Convention (EPC), European patents shall be granted for inventions which inter alia involve an inventive step. The central legal provision explaining what this means, i.e. the central legal provision relating to the inventive step under the EPC, is Article 56 EPC. It provides that an invention, having regard to the state of the art, must not be obvious to a person skilled in the art. The Boards of Appeal of the European Patent Office (EPO) have developed an approach, called the "problem-solution approach", to assess whether an invention involves an inventive step.
Read more about Inventive Step Under The European Patent Convention: Problem-solution Approach, Partial Problems, Inventions Consisting in A Mixture of Technical and Non-technical Features, Landmark Decisions
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