No one ever told the inventor why the safety rules changed between places.
At the western edge of the site—past the scaffolds, past the corroded stairwell with the missing fourth step, past even the dusty sign warning of “hazardous particles beyond this point”—there lay what the workers called the second environment. No one ever asked where the first had ended. No one ever remembered a line being drawn. But the rules changed there. Rules that no one could see, until they were broken.
The inventor had watched the transition countless times. A welder would approach the zone wearing all the correct equipment for the mixing bay. But as they crossed a space no wider than a sidewalk, a shrill beep would erupt from their data hub, a boxy little device strapped to the belt like a forgotten pager from another age. A red triangle would flash. The respirator was wrong, or the filter was wrong, or the rules were wrong. And there would be shouting. And paperwork. And sometimes suspension.
The inventor, who wore no helmet and was exempt from respirators by virtue of belonging to the development department, asked a question that no one else had bothered to ask:
Couldn’t the data hub know where the worker was going before they got there?
It was a strange question to ask in that place. The EHS documents described zones in absolutes, in ink and italics. They did not allow for intentions or motion. A worker either was in the environment, or was not. The rules either applied, or did not. There was no consideration for a future that had not yet occurred.
But the inventor imagined something new: a system that could predict context. Not after entry, but before. A wearable data hub that spoke to the PPE itself. A smart respirator that knew what environment it would soon operate in. A mechanism not of correction but of anticipation. And so the invention was born.
It was not elegant. Nothing in the documents was. The claim recited a series of relations that only made sense in diagrams. There was a hub, separate from the PPE but communicatively linked. There was context data—an amorphous substance made of positional information and PPE metadata and work environment indicators. There were programmable safety rules, floating like bureaucratic edicts, waiting to be triggered when the data hub decided that the user had “moved” from a first to a second environment.
The phrase “corresponds to positional information” was a particular source of pride. The inventor had typed it slowly, deliberately, imagining a scene where the worker’s GPS coordinates crossed some threshold—perhaps an invisible border—where the rules would shift without delay. The system would respond not to failure, but to trajectory.
And yet when the invention was submitted to the European Patent Office, silence met ambition.
The examiner did not see the movement, only the destination. The claim, they said, did not preclude the worker from having already entered the second environment. The system, they said, could just as easily trigger after the fact. Worse: they found a prior art document—a certain D1—that described a wearable device that detected PPE and issued alerts when the worker neared a workstation. “Near” was close enough. The rules, they said, were the same.
The application was refused.
The inventor did not sleep the night the decision came.
The letter arrived in a thin white envelope. It bore no signs of violence, yet its contents undid months—no, years—of effort with a single phrase: “The invention lacks novelty over D1.”
D1. It always returned to D1. That cryptic document with numbered paragraphs and vague descriptions. D1 had become a shadow companion to the invention, mimicking it at every turn. According to the European Patent Office, D1 already disclosed what the inventor had invented. It spoke of proximity, signal strength, PPE detection. It spoke just enough to be dangerous.
The inventor read the rejection again and again, lips moving silently. There was no comfort in the prose. The language of the Office was meticulous, almost sterile, and yet every sentence dripped with an invisible judgment: You should have known better.
But the inventor did know better.
D1, for all its detail, was crude. It waited until the worker had entered the zone—had already trespassed into danger—before acting. It was reactive. The invention was predictive. A threshold would be crossed before the breach, a rule applied before the mistake. This difference, the inventor believed, was enough to distinguish invention from routine.
And so the inventor appealed.
The appeal was sent not to the same people who had issued the refusal, but to a new tribunal: the Board of Appeal. They sat in a different building, and wore different expressions. But their eyes were no less precise.
The hearing was scheduled for a morning in November. It took place by videoconference, though the inventor could not tell whether the flicker in the signal was from bandwidth or bureaucratic indifference.
The representatives began their case. They spoke of context and thresholds and wearable hubs. They gestured, invisibly, to Figure 1. They cited paragraph [41] as if it were scripture: the moment when a rule prevented entry into a contaminated environment because the respirator was not equipped with the right filter.
“This is not the same as D1,” they insisted. “D1 waits. We anticipate.”
The Board listened. And when they spoke, they did so in a tone that neither encouraged nor condemned. Their words were blunt, and the inventor had the sensation of walking into a hallway that did not exist on the map.
“The claim wording,” said the Board, “does not exclude the scenario in which the safety rule is triggered after the user has entered the environment.”
The inventor blinked. The difference, once bright and visible, became a ghost.
The representative persisted. “But the positional information… the GPS… the claim implies—”
“Implies,” said the Board, “is not sufficient. The claim must define.”
They acknowledged that the application mentioned movement and thresholds, but the claims did not mandate them. The words “in response to the user moving from the first to the second work environment” were too vague. One could move and already be there.
And the GPS? Yes, D1 mentioned GPS. It did not specify how it was used, but it mentioned it. And so, in the eyes of the law, it might as well have done everything.
Finally, the decision came: dismissed.
The invention had failed.
Not in thunder, but in carefully formatted paragraphs. Numbered. Double-spaced. Digitally authenticated. The signature line read not like a name, but like a verdict: “The appeal is dismissed.”
The words explained everything. And nothing.
The Board had acknowledged the invention. They recited its structure with care: a data hub, a PPE article, a programmable rule. They understood that the rule could be configured based on context, and that context could include position. They understood that GPS was involved, and that different work environments could trigger different configurations.
But they also saw D1.
D1, that eternal specter, had described proximity detection using signal strength. It did not use GPS for positioning—not explicitly—but it mentioned the device had a GPS receiver. That, said the Board, was enough. A skilled person, confronted with D1, would learn about the invention.
There was no novelty. The invention—so carefully assembled—was invisible in the eyes of the law.
The inventor reread the justification:
“In cases like this, where the claim covers multiple scenarios, the lack of novelty of one of them cannot be remedied by the argument that the others are novel.”
One scenario was enough to doom the rest.
The inventor felt a strange dissociation. As though the invention had always existed in two states: approved and refused. It was not a question of what the invention did, but of what the claim allowed it to be read as doing. The problem was not technical. It was metaphysical. One could not patent intent. Only form.
The Board even allowed themselves a mild rebuke:
“If the appellant intended to pursue the second alternative specifically, they should have limited the claim to this alternative during the first-instance proceedings…”
Too late. Too vague. Too broad. Too little.
The hallway had no clocks. Time was not measured here. Only decisions.
And yet, in the quiet, a final insight emerged—not as comfort, but as warning. A practical guidance whispered between the lines of a decision:
- Claim what you mean, exactly. Do not imply.
- File focused requests early. Do not assume generosity at appeal.
- Avoid ambiguity. If your invention requires a rule to fire before entry, say so.
- Prior art is a shape-shifter. Even if it does not do what you do, it may appear to.
- And above all: never underestimate the capacity of the system to interpret absence as consent.
The inventor rose—not in triumph, but in clarity.
They stepped outside, into a world where rules changed between environments. Where borders were invisible. Where movement could be measured, but meaning could not. And though their invention had not survived the journey through the Office, something else had:
The knowledge that in the great machinery of examination, novelty is not what you build. It is what you claim.
Based on T 0753/22 (Location-based safety rules/3M INNOVATIVE PROPERTIES)