EPC - general practice, new provisions, EPC.App updates

The 8th edition of our EPC reference book is released – as always in English and German with same content.

This update of our electronic commentary and printed books to legal status of 1st April 2022 is considering:

• New EPO Guidelines which entered into force in March 2022
• Any Official Journal articles until March 2022 and thereby implied changes
• Increased EPO fees valid as of April 2022 (open in EPC.App)
• Case law of the Boards of Appeal published until April 2022, including the referrals G1/22 + G2/22 (open in EPC.App) – we correspondingly updated our integrated case law database which contains all ever issued EPO Boards of Appeal decisions (more than 40,000 overall)

Some interesting changes of the Guidelines update this year were:

• G-II, 3.3.2 which outlines the concept of a “potential technical effect” in view of G 1/19 (open in EPC.App)
• A-III, 5.3 which clarifies the practical solution that the residence for the designation of the inventor may also be that of the applicant (open in EPC.App)
• F-IV, 4.3 which addresses the ongoing debate of description amendments (open in EPC.App)
• E-VIII, 1.6.2.3 which further specifies the scope of application of R. 134 EPC (open in EPC.App)
• E-IX, 2.1.1 which clarifies the office practice if application documents are not specified for the EP phase as required by R. 159(1)(b) EPC (open in EPC.App)

The continuous review process of adding more details and reconsidering existing comments throughout the book lead to numerous additional changes, most prominent in the chapters on Art. 79, 87, 116, 133, 138, and further aspects of the upcoming UPC package at Art. 142, 147, 149a. EQE 2022 has been tested by us and we believe it was possible to find guidance to all EPC questions of pre-exam and paper D in the previous November 2021 edition of the book.

As new option of the platform, our database of legal provisions has been extended to now include almost all Official Journal articles since 2014 as annotatable full text (with few exceptions that cannot be displayed due to tables or drawings). From the newly covered about 750 articles, we authors placed selected ones in the book in the sections of Art. 88, 92, 94, 127, 142, 147, Rfees 1, 3, 9 (sample screenshot below). Others can be added by yourself and now offer more flexibility when further shaping this book according to your own needs, e.g. to obtain an optimized EQE 2023 reference book. For elements already included in your personal scope before the update, the full texts are hidden to not screw up your book unintentionally. You can display them in the “structure” pane by removing the “title only” flag in the edit window of the respective element.

As usual, all changes of the update are automatically included in the online version on the next login. And as part of our update service, changes are additionally indicated by brief blue update notes in the App as shown in the screenshot above and further explained in the FAQs. Of course, self-edited user content from before the update is retained on the webserver of the online App, and can be exported into the printable PDF offline version so as to avoid any time-consuming transfer of handwritten annotations to the new edition. A 2-minute video illustrating the update process and related functions can also be found in our youtube channel.

To further avoid the need of replacing pages in a folder, a customized color paperback with up-to-date content and typed user comments can be ordered via our integrated print-on-demand service. This is offered using a world-wide operating print provider. Among all the prints of the last edition, a few printing or shipment issues have been reported to us. From my perspective, they were always addressed quickly and in customer friendly manner (kindly correct me if I am wrong).

For those who still prefer to start with a classical printed book, we published also the EPC.App April 2022 Edition as stand-alone black-and-white paperback (see top image). The book is available in many Amazon marketplaces: GB, DE, FR, NL, ES, IT, US, CA, JP, and of course in a German version.

To encourage trying-out the more advanced online version of the book, a free one month test account is available (can for example be used to follow the above links into the EPC.App). The test period does not extend automatically, and after expiry, the account can only be manually extended with true customer intention.