Internet as a source of prior art

[6] The Internet is a popular source of technical information and is of particular interest for the purposes of establishing the prior art.

[7] In August 2009, the European Patent Office (EPO) published a "notice concerning internet citations"[8] to "[set] out the practice followed at the EPO when citing documents retrieved from the internet in both the European and the PCT procedure."

[11] The two decisions originate from a contrived test case built by the parties, i.e. the patent proprietor and the opponent.

[12] In decision T 1553/06 (page 72), the Board proposed a test to decide whether a document stored on the World Wide Web has been made available to the public, whereas, in decision T2/09, the Board dealt with the alleged public availability of an email transmitted over the Internet.

[11] The EPO Guidelines cite the Internet Archive as well as Wikipedia as possible and credible sources of prior art.

Graphic representation of less than 0.0001% of the WWW , one of the services accessible via the Internet, representing some of the hyperlinks . The use of the Internet as prior art in patent law is surrounded by concerns as to its reliability.
European Patent Office (EPO) headquarters in Munich , Germany .