The Federal Supreme Court has issued a new decision (BGH X ZR 29/15 ) on the subject of equivalent patent infringement.

The principles of the decision are the following:

a) A patent infringement with equivalent means in general has to be negated if the specification reveals several possibilities of achieving a certain technical result, however only one possibility was added to the patent claim.

b) For the applicability of this principle it is not sufficient that the claimed embodiment is based on information in the specification or for other reasons on s a specific application of a more general principle of the solution and due to these findings the person skilled in the art was not able to find further embodiments according to this solution principle.

c) It is admissible to use statements of the applicant made during the granting procedure as indication how a person skilled in the art understands the subject-matter of the patent. The same applies with respect to the statements made by the examiner. Nevertheless, those indications cannot simply be used as sole basis for the interpretation.