Monday, March 29, 2010 EQE 2010: claim 1, 54(2)

With the new DeltaPatents website online we can start working at the content again. As promised, I will say something about the 54(2) attack on claim 1 of last month's EQE exam.

A 54(2) attack may either use novelty or inventive step. Before selecting a closest prior art or novelty destroying embodiment we first determine the claimed object, i.e. a liquid dispenser with a gaseous propellant. Then we try to find this object in the available 54(2) documents (A2, A3, A5). A2 is about a gas dispenser (first line of [0001]), A3 uses an aluminium bottle (first line of [0001]) and in A5 the trapping material is not coated on the wall ([0005] in combination with item 56 in the figure). It is clear that we cannot do a novelty attack and have to select a closest prior art.

Monday, March 22, 2010 EQE C 2010: claim 1, 54(3)

Claim 1 claims a liquid dispenser with a gaseous propellant. For finding all required attacks on this claim we first have to find out what documents we are allowed to use. After determining the effective date of claim 1 (filing date LU1) and looking at the relevant dates of the Annexes, we know that there are two 54(3) documents, A4 and A6, and three 54(2) documents.

First we try to find all 54(3) attacks by looking for claim features not disclosed in A4 or A6. For A6 the situation is pretty clear. A6 only discloses a valve and not a dispenser. We can (for now) disregard this document.