Saturday 27 November 2010

T 479/09 – Skilled, Not Stupid


The skilled person may not be the brightest person in the world (you might remember that T 60/89 [2.2.4] had found that “the skilled person in the field of genetic engineering in 1978 [was] not to be defined as a Nobel Prize laureate, even if a number of scientists working in this field at that time were actually awarded the Nobel Prize”), but he/she is not a dummy either.

[2] The [opponent] argued that “all disclosure in the patent specification relating to the claimed pad gives the weight of the cigarette paper in the units gm² or g m². The dimension expressed by this unit is … the dimension of a moment of inertia” and that therefore, the skilled person would be completely confused and unable to carry out the invention.

This point of view cannot be shared. Any skilled person in the paper industry will have no problem in understanding the units involved as the units gm2 or g m2 are well understood and commonly used to mean grams per square metre, all the more, because as indicated inter alia in D5 which is a glossary defining paper print terms “gm2” is a way of expressing the weight of paper in grams per square metre.

Should you wish to download the whole decision, just click here.

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