CONSTRUCTIONAL BOARD

[Title of the patent] “CONSTRUCTIONAL BOARD”

[Key issue] “Finding of the differences between the Invention and the cited invention” (Article 29, paragraph (2) of the Patent Act)

Court stated in the decision “…when a difference between the Invention and the primarily cited invention is to be found, it is reasonable to find the difference between them as a collective structure as a unit from a viewpoint of a solution to the technical problem of the invention.  It is inappropriate to find the differences by particularly finely segmenting them and to determine whether each of the differences could have been easily conceived of without considering the above viewpoint, since the invention for which the inventive step should have been found could not be properly determined and the inventive step could be denied as a result.”