In Comes G2/21, Out Goes Plausibility

EPO patent practitioners (especially those in chemistry and life sciences) can stop holding their breath because the long awaited EPO Enlarged Board of Appeal decision G2/21 "Plausibility" has been handed down.

A more thorough consideration and commentary on the practical consequences of the decision will follow, but it looks like "plausibility" in the historical EPO sense is to become a concept of the past.

The Enlarged Board has indicated that "The relevant standard for the reliance on a purported technical effect when assessing whether or not the claimed subject-matter involves an inventive step concerns the question of what the skilled person, with the common general knowledge in mind, would understand at the filing date from the application as originally filed as the technical teaching of the claimed invention. The technical effect relied upon, even at a later stage, needs to be encompassed by that technical teaching and to embody the same invention, because