Decision Keyword:
Rotor elements
Law applied:
EPC Art. 64 para. 1, para. 3, 69 para. 1, 70 para. 1
PatG §§ 9 sentence 2 no. 1, 14
PatG §§ 139 para. 1, 140a para. 4
Code of Civil Procedure (ZPO) §§ 148, 529 para. 1, 531 para. 2
Summary: (Machine Translation)
1. In continuation of the principle according to which the same terms in the context of a patent claim must, in case of doubt, be given the same meaning (Federal Supreme Court (BGH), GRUR 2017, 152 para. 17 - Zungenbett), different terms are also given different meanings in case of doubt and a linguistic differentiation thus indicates a different understanding. However, just as the first principle does not rule out the possibility that the same terms may have different meanings in different contexts, it is equally possible that different terms in a claim may have the same meaning or that a linguistic differentiation may have no more than a clarifying effect. This is to be assumed if the interpretation of the claim as a whole, taking into account the description and the markings, results in such an understanding.
2. Disclosure and scope of protection have nothing directly to do with each other. The fact that a certain embodiment is not described in the patent specification does not therefore mean that it cannot be covered by the claim.
3. When interpreting the claim, it must be disregarded whether this leads to a result in which the claim contains an inadmissible extension compared to the original documents.
4. Both the method claim as a whole and the technical context in which the individual method steps are described in the description of the patent can lead to a specification of the sequence of the method steps. In this respect, it depends, among other things, on whether the claim together with the description expresses that a certain technical situation brought about by other preceding process steps is assumed for individual process steps, or whether, due to the absence of such a technical context, individual process steps can be carried out technically separately and independently of each other in terms of time and therefore without observing a certain sequence.
Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court (OLG), Judgment of May 16, 2024 – 2 U 70/23 –
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