Closest prior art for Claim 3 in paper C 2016

There has been some discussion around what should be the closest prior art for Claim 3 in paper C of EQE 2016. We received attacks on Claim 3 starting from A3, A5, and A6. In this post we'll review the arguments for selecting the closest prior art in Claim 3.

Paper C 2016 - Reusable cooling device

Paper C of the EQE of 2016 provides us with an excursion into cooling devices for horses. My first impression is that this paper should be doable in the time provided. Although the number of annexes is a bit large (7), one of them quickly disappears when making the paper and another is 54(3) for most of the claims.

Below is an indication of our solution. Note that in a full solution more details need to be given.

C 2016: First impressions?


To all who sat the C-paper today:

What are your first impressions to this year's C-paper?
Any general or specific comments?

Was the number of claims as expected, or more, or less? And the number of prior art documents?
Were the various attack types well balanced - novelty, inventive step, added subject-matter, ...?
Was the described technology well understandable? For electronics/electricity attorneys, mechanics attorneys, chemists, biotech attorneys, ...?

How many marks do you expect to have scored?
What is your expectation of the pass rate and the average score?
How did this year's paper compare to the 2013, 2014 and 2015 papers (assuming your practiced those)

The paper and our answers

Copies of the paper will be provided on this blog as soon as we have received copies of the papers, in all three languages here (English, French and German).

The core of our answers will be given as soon as possible in a separate blog post.

We look forward to your comments!
Comments are welcome in any official EPO language, not just English. So, comments in German and French are also very welcome!

Please do not post your comments anonymously - it is allowed, but it makes responding more difficult and rather clumsy ("Dear Mr/Mrs/Ms Anonymous of 03-03-2015 03:03"), whereas using your real name or a pseudonym is more personal, more interesting and makes a more attractive conversation. You do not need to log in or make an account - it is OK to just put your (nick) name at the end of your post.

Please post your comments as to first impressions and general remarks to this blog.
Please post responses to our answer (as soon as available) to the separate blog post with our answer.
Thanks!


Jelle, Sander, Nico, Joeri, Gregory