At the oral proceedings today, April 5, 2011, the Opposition Division of the EPO, in charge of opposition proceedings against European patent EP 1 220 114 of OB10, decided to fully revoke the patent at issue. The patent of OB10 relates to a router for translating incoming invoices into an intermediate format before storing them in a data warehouse, and then forwarding the invoices to a recipient. The patent could potentially affect a broad range of software companies and financial institutions. The opposition proceedings involved 19 opponents, which is the largest number of admissible oppositions filed in the history of the EPO (the well-known Harvard Oncomouse case relating to European patent EP 0 169 672 only involved 17 admissible oppositions). Müller-Boré & Partner has been entrusted with the representation a major German software company in the opposition against the OB10 patent.

The official file of the EPO on the patent of OB10 can be inspected under the following link:

https://register.epo.org/espacenet/application?number=EP01309765&lng=en&tab=main