A patent is often defined as a "contract" between a state and the patentee, whereby the state grants the patentee a monopoly over the exploitation of the invention as protected in the patent for up to 20 years, throughout the territory of the state, in exchange of the disclosure of the invention by the patentee in the patent application, which will be made public.
Without the monopoly conferred, the patentee would have a greater incentive to keep the invention secret in order to delay the market entry of competitors.
The sufficiency of the disclosure of the invention in a patent application is therefore central to the existence of the patent: it is in Europe before EPO a condition for grant and validity of the granted patent and is often examined in relation to the clarity of the invention.
Vigilance when drafting a patent application is therefore essential.
Although it is not necessary to describe the invention in every detail, since the sufficiency of the disclosure is examined from the point of view of the person skilled in the art, it is nevertheless necessary to ensure that there is no ambiguity in the description of the invention (see EPO decision T521/12) and that all the features are present, in particular that all the parts of the drawings are duly described.
It will also be necessary to ensure, where a measurement is indicated, that the method, the conditions and the apparatus for the measurement are indicated, so that the measurement is reproducible by a person skilled in the art.
Where ranges of values are indicated, these ranges must be measurable in practice (EPO T386/17), and it is essential to ensure that the effect of the invention can be obtained over the whole range of values indicated, for example by multiplying the examples.
For inventions relating to artificial intelligence, the training data set will need to be precisely described (EPO T161/18).
The drafter will be able to rely on the inventors to meet the requirement of sufficiency of disclosure, without adding unnecessary details