The board in T 89/00, citing T 260/85 (OJ 1989, 105), T 64/96 and T 415/91, held that, according to the case law of the boards of appeal, a distinction must be made between what the original documents of a patent directly and unambiguously disclosed to a skilled person and what said skilled person on the basis of this disclosure may do upon reflection and using his imagination. His thinking is not part of the content of the original documents of the patent. See also T 553/15.

In T 782/16 the board held that for a correct application of the gold standard, a distinction needed to be made between subject-matter which was disclosed either implicitly or explicitly in the original (or earlier) application and therefore could be directly derived from it, and subject-matter which was the result of an intellectual process, in particular a complex one, carried out on what was disclosed. In the case at issue, the appellant's reasoning was based on an intellectual processing of the subject-matter disclosed in the original (or earlier) application rather than a direct and unambiguous derivation as required by the "gold" standard.