Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office decides about public availability of a document stored on the World Wide Web

In a decision of March 12, 2012 a Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office decided on a test case under which conditions a document stored on the World Wide Web is publically available and forms state of the art. The board of appeal required “direct and unambiguous access” to the means of disclosure as opposed to a mere theoretical possibility of having access. Here, two important criteria are whether the document could be found with the help of a public web search engine by using one or more key words which are all related to the essence of the content of the document and whether the document remained accessible at that URL for a period of time long enough for a member of the public to have direct and unambiguous access to the document.