Sufficiency of disclosure

Sufficiency of description in relation to carrying out the invention means that the invention must be capable of being performed and reproduced by the person skilled in the art on the basis of the description and the accompanying drawings (Articles L. 613-25 and L. 612-5 of the French Intellectual Property Code). The skilled person must be able to rely on the description and the drawings to carry out the invention defined in the claims. The purpose of the description is to disclose the invention to the person skilled in the art. It must give intellectual access to the invention, so that anyone can freely take knowledge of it, but not industrial access. Mere operations of execution or adaptation, on the basis of the patent and of the common general knowledge of the skilled person, may be required to carry out the teaching. In other words, the description of the invention in the patent must be sufficiently clear and complete to allow an expert in the technical field to understand how the invention works and to reproduce it without further inventiveness. If the description is insufficient, the patent may be held invalid, because it does not fulfil its function of contributing to the state of the art by providing a complete and clear description of the invention. Sufficiency of description is therefore an important element of the validity of a patent and is often examined in the course of the patent application. The courts may also examine sufficiency of description when hearing a patent infringement action, in order to determine whether the invention is sufficiently described in the patent in relation to the alleged infringement.