In T 4/83 (OJ 1983, 498) the board held that when assessing novelty, it should be taken into consideration that any information in a patent specification which conveyed to the person skilled in the art a technical teaching, belonged to the content of the disclosure irrespective of whether or not it fell within the scope of the claims or what purpose it served.

Once the state of the art has been established, using the criteria described above, and its content has been determined, the final step is to ascertain whether the invention in question differs from the prior art.

In T 607/93 the board decided that when novelty and inventive step were being assessed, there was no reason to use the description to interpret an excessively broad claim more narrowly, if it was a question not of understanding concepts that required explanation but rather of examining an excessively broad request in relation to the state of the art.