Inventions Consisting in A Mixture of Technical and Non-technical Features
An invention may consist in a mixture of technical and non-technical features. In such cases, the EPO generally applies the so-called "Comvik approach" (cf. T 641/00) to assess whether the invention involves an inventive step. In the "Comvik approach", any non-technical feature, i.e. a feature from a field excluded from patentability under Article 52(2) and (3) EPC, is ignored for the assessment of inventive step, unless the non-technical features do interact with the technical subject-matter to solve a technical problem. Assessing whether or not a feature contributes to the technical character of a claim has been viewed as difficult.
Read more about this topic: Inventive Step Under The European Patent Convention
Famous quotes containing the words inventions, consisting, mixture, technical and/or features:
“Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.”
—Kenneth MacKenzie Clark, Baron of Saltwood (1903–1983)
“Marriage. The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.”
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“Finally she grew quiet, and after that, coherent thought. With this, stalked through her a cold, bloody rage. Hours of this, a period of introspection, a space of retrospection, then a mixture of both. Out of this an awful calm.”
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“When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”
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““It looks as if
Some pallid thing had squashed its features flat
And its eyes shut with overeagerness
To see what people found so interesting
In one another, and had gone to sleep
Of its own stupid lack of understanding,
Or broken its white neck of mushroom stuff
Short off, and died against the windowpane.””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)