Key points
- The opponent produced sufficient evidence in 2015 of a web publication in 2006 (before the priority date) by a combination of web.archive.org print screens (showing a link to a PDF file) and an affidavit from an author stating that the PDF wile was published in 2005 and was never changed.
- " According to the affidavit S19 by [Mr. H], founder of [H] Ultrasonic LLC and author of document S13, document S13 was added in December 2005 to his website, thus publicly available from that moment on. Further, according to his affidavit, no changes were made to document S13 after December 2005."
- " there is no reason to believe that the author of document S13 in his affidavit is not telling the truth. He appears to be an independent person who does not seem to have any business, economic or other relationship with any of the parties involved in the proceedings. Nor did the appellant contest the validity of the affidavit. There is also no convincing reason not to believe the author's statement in his affidavit that document S13 is unchanged since December 2005.
- " Secondly, the probability that the Internet links functioned correctly is estimated to be higher than the opposite. There is no reason to provide Internet links which do not function. The probability that the Internet links worked correctly, but that the wayback machine "web.archive.org" in its random crawls did not arrive at the lowest hierarchical page S18 earlier than 2 May 2006, is estimated to be higher than the opposite. Given the affidavit, it also seems unlikely that a version published in December 2005 had different content from document S13."
EPO T 0454/18
The link to the decision is provided after the jump, as well as (an extract of) the text of the decision.
source http://justpatentlaw.blogspot.com/2022/06/t-045418-proof-of-internet-publication.html
