Europeran Patent Office, Board of appeal, 28.-09.2023, case numeber T 0447/ 22 – 3.2.05, Patent Proprietor: Picote Solutions Oy Ltd , § 13.1 Reasons, p. 43 ss:
<<There is an extensive body of case law of the Boards of
Appeal according to which, within certain limits, a
claim may be interpreted with the help of the
description and the drawings for understanding the
subject-matter to be assessed under the requirements of
the EPC.
It is a general principle applied throughout the EPC
that a term of a claim can be interpreted only in
context. The claims do not stand on their own, but
together with the description and the drawings they are
part of a unitary document, which must be read as a
whole (see e.g. T 556/02, Reasons 5.3; T 1646/12,
Reasons 2.1, T 1817/14, Reasons 7.3, and T 169/20,
Reasons 1).
The extent to which description and drawings can
provide an aid to interpret the claims is however
subject to certain limitations.
A decision often cited in this context is T 190/99,
which in point 2.4 of the Reasons states that the
skilled person when considering a claim should rule out
interpretations which are illogical or which do not
make technical sense. He should try, with synthetical
propensity i.e. building up rather than tearing down,
to arrive at an interpretation of the claim which is
technically sensible and takes into account the whole
disclosure of the patent; the patent must be construed
by a mind willing to understand not a mind desirous of
misunderstanding.
The present board concurs with T 1408/04 (Reasons 1)
that this statement must be understood to mean only
that technically illogical interpretations should be
excluded (see also T 1582/08, Reasons 16, and T 169/20,
Reasons 1.3.3). A claim can thus be interpreted in the
light of the description and the drawings to the extent
that they contain logical and technical sensible
information.
Furthermore, interpreting the claims in the light of
the description and the drawings does not make it
legitimate to read into the claim features appearing
only in the description or the drawings and then
relying on such features to provide a distinction over
the prior art. This would not be to interpret claims
but to rewrite them (see T 881/01, Reasons 2.1). In this context, it is important to differentiate between a claim consisting of terms with a clear technical
meaning and an unclear claim wording. The preparatory
material available on the discussions leading up to the
European Patent Convention shows that even in the
framework of Article 69 EPC and its Protocol on
Interpretation (see for instance Armitage, “Die
Auslegung europäischer Patente”, in GRUR Int. 1983,
242; Decker in Stauder/Luginbühl, “Europäisches
Patentübereinkommen”, 9th edition, Art 69, marginal no.
22, with reference to Stauder, “Die
Entstehungsgeschichte von Art 69(1) EPÜ und Art 8(3)
StraßbÜ über den Schutzbereich des Patents”, GRUR Int.
1990, 793, 799), it was never the scope to exclude what
on the clear meaning was covered by the terms of the
claims. Accordingly, many decisions of the Boards of
Appeal have concluded that a discrepancy between the
claims and the description is not a valid reason to
ignore the clear linguistic structure of a claim and to
interpret it differently (see, for example, T 431/03,
Reasons 2.2.2; T 1597/12, Reasons 3.2.1; T 1249/14,
Reasons 1.5). The description cannot be used to give a
different meaning to a claim feature which in itself
imparts a clear, credible technical teaching to the
skilled reader (T 1018/02, Reasons 3.8; T 1391/15,
Reasons 3.5). On a similar note, the board in T 197/10
(Reasons 2.3) held that, in the event of a discrepancy
between the claims and the description, those elements
of the description not reflected in the claims are not,
as a rule, to be taken into account for the examination
of novelty and inventive step>>.
(segnalazione di Rose Hughes in IPKat)