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We completed this year’s second update of our EPC.App reference book to legal status of 1^st November 2025. As always, it is available in English and German versions with same content.

This meanwhile 15th edition of our EPC commentary covers all Official Journal articles until October 2025 with thereby implied changes of EPC provisions and is dedicated for use in EQE 2026 (this year, all included changes came into force before the EQE cut-off date of 31 October).

Key changes since the last update in April 2025 were:

1. Several decisions issued by the Enlarged Board of Appeal
   • G 1/23 (open in EPC.App at A. 54) states that a product put on the market before the date of filing cannot be excluded from the state of the art for the sole reason that its composition or internal structure could not be analysed and reproduced by the skilled person before that date. This follows the logic that a product put on the marked was possible to be obtained by the skilled person in its readily available form and any manufacturing of a product inherently requires at some point in the production chain to turn to a material that you cannot produce yourself.
   • G 1/24 (at A. 69) clarifies that while the claims are of course the starting point and the basis for assessing the patentability of an invention under Articles 52 to 57 EPC, also the description and drawings shall always be consulted to interpret the claims in such assessment. This rejects prior case law which saw no need to refer to the description unless a claim is unclear or ambiguous, however leaves it completely open whether consultation of the description also leads to any different interpretation of the claims.
   • G 2/24 (at A. 105) confirms G 3/04 in that after withdrawal of all appeals, appeal proceedings may not be continued with a third party who intervened during the appeal proceedings in accordance with Article 105 EPC. The third party intervening in appeal does not acquire the status of a person entitled to appeal, whereas this would be the case for an intervention in opposition.
   • New referral G 1/25 has further been accepted by the Enlarged Board (T 697/22 at A. 100). It will hopefully bring more clarity on the long-waiting question whether it is necessary to adapt the description to amended claims so as to remove an inconsistency between the claims and the description introduced by an amendment in opposition (or examination) proceedings.
   • In addition to these cases, the integrated case law database of the online EPC.App has been complemented by all BoA decisions published until end of October 2025. Further decisions thereof can be added or cited in personal annotations as needed using the self-editing functions (illustrated in this video).
2. A new version of the Case Law of the Boards of Appeal book has been published in July 2025 (see here), which consolidates annual changes since the last edition of 2022. In the EPC.App, all references to the old edition have been replaced by corresponding new ones.
3. Associations of representatives registered at the EPO have been opened for legal practitioners as of 01 Oct 2025 (OJ 2025, A48 at A. 133). From that date, administration of such associations is further possible via MyEPO.
4. As of 1 June 2025, a simplified procedure for ex officio deletions from the list of representatives (in particular in case of non-payment of the epi subscription) has been introduced (OJ 2025, A36 at A. 134). It foresees to send a communication on intended deletion and to proceed with deletion if no request for an appealable decision is filed within 2 months.
5. As further parts of modernizing processes at the EPO
   • from 01 May 2025, oral proceedings may be audio recorded by the EPO for preparing minutes using AI (OJ 2025, A32 at A. 116). It will be interesting to see whether such minutes become generally more detailed than those created manually by examiners. The recordings will be deleted once the minutes are issued to the parties so that they do not serve as later proof of accuracy.
   • as of 01 Oct 2025, drawings may be executed in colour or in greyscale, if they are filed electronically (OJ 2025, A49 at A. 78) and are then no longer converted into back and white. The latter is still done with colour elements in the description, claims or abstracts.
   • the continuing pilot project on DOCX filing has received a new definition of “DOCX” valid as of 01 Oct 2025, which allows the drawings to be filed as separate document in PDF (OJ 2025, A50 at A. 75).
   • evidence of multimedia disclosures captured by the EPO is made available via MyEPO as of 01 July 2025 (OJ 2025, A41 at A. 117).
6. Montenegro has acceeded the London Agreement effective as of 01 Aug 2025 (OJ 2025, A43 at A. 65). This step was expected since the requirement of only claims in Montenegrin in case of an English specification already applied before.

The above links to the online versions of the book can be followed when being logged-in. A free one month test account is available, which does not extend automatically after expiry.

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 about 30 brief blue update notes in the App as shown on the screen in the image above and further explained in the FAQs. Of course, self-edited user content from before the update is retained in the respective personal storage on the webserver, and can be exported into the printable PDF offline version so as to avoid 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 high-quality print-on-demand service (see image above).

For those who still prefer to start with a classical printed book, we published also the EPC.App November 2025 Edition as stand-alone black-and-white paperback. The book is available in English and German via Amazon.

Coming soon: We are working on a new version of the EPC.App online platform. It is planned to be released in 2026 and will come with a much more intuitive user interface and several new navigation and editing functions. At the same time, it will retain full backward compatibility with the current version as well as all personal content stored in the database.