T 641/00

rdf:langString T 641/00

rdf:langString T 641/00, also known as Two identities/COMVIK, is a decision of a Technical Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office (EPO), issued on September 26, 2002. It is a landmark decision regarding the patentable subject matter requirement and inventive step under the European Patent Convention (EPC). More generally, it is a significant decision regarding the patentability of business methods and computer-implemented inventions under the EPC. The Board in T 641/00 held that: An invention consisting of a mixture of technical and non-technical features and having technical character as a whole is to be assessed with respect to the requirement of inventive step by taking account of all those features which contribute to said technical character whereas features making no such contribution cannot support the presence of inventive step. Non-technical aspects of an invention must be treated as constraints in the formulation of the objective technical problem in the context of the problem-solution approach, the approach which is generally applied by the EPO for assessing whether an invention involves an inventive step.