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Wednesday, November 24, 2004

UK-PTO on Patent Applications relating to Methods of doing Business.

The

UK-PTO informs the general public:

"We are receiving an increasing number of patent applications relating to methods of doing business that are inherently unpatentable. In the usual course of events, at the examination stage there are several exchanges of correspondence between the examiner and the applicant, as the applicant makes successive attempts to rephrase the claims in the hope of coming up with some that are patentable and/or deal with other, less-important issues that have been raised. Only when the end of the rule 34 period1 is imminent is a hearing appointed, normally at short notice. The Hearing Officer then issues a lengthy decision, going carefully through all the arguments advanced. Often, these arguments are very similar to those that have been advanced in many other cases.

We have come to the conclusion that this is not an efficient and sensible use of our resources, nor is it a sensible procedure from the applicant's perspective as it simply increases costs for no real benefit. Accordingly, we are making two changes to the way we handle business method applications for which the examiner considers there is very little, or no, prospect of grant because the invention is inherently unpatentable: [...]"

Read more ...

There is also provided an interesting

collection of UK decisions on patentable subject-matter in this field.

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