Paper C 2022 (Part 1 and Part 2) - EPO scores with accessible paper
The theme of this year's paper was football. Specifically, the electronic detection of goals.
This was the second year with the online electronic paper C. Like last year, you were provided with all of the prior art in the first half, but not with all of A1's description. Last year the claims were split down the middle, with 3 claims in each half; this year the first half had 2 claims and the second half had 4 claims.
Some felt that last year's claim split was not ideal, as most of the analysis is done in the first half. This year with one claim less to do, there was enough time to read everything.
The application did not claim priority; thus the effective date section was straightforward. But the list of evidence made up for it, and was more challenging, with a lot of admissibility issues: A2 was a newsletter for which you would have to argue that it was available in time. A3 was clearly too late, but contained lots of information about past prior art. A4 referred to a conference, but with the twist that the slides of the talk were provided to the participants. A5 was regular prior art and A6 a 54(3).