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BLOG@IP::JURPatent Attorney Axel H Horns' Blog on Intellectual Property Law.
Thursday, April 06, 2006New UK Case Law on Patentability of CIIs. The Honourable Mr. Justice Mann of The High Court Of Justice - Chancery Division / Patents Court - in London has handed down a Decision cited as [2006] EWHC 705 (Ch) dated April 03, 2006. The decision is about UK application GB 0314464.9 filed as a UK national phase of PCT Application PCT/AU2001/001526 and titled "Automated method of acquiring the documents necessary to incorporate a company" which had, on March 22, 2005, previously been rejected by the UK Patent Office. Now, Mr. Mann has dismissed the Appeal filed by the Applicant:"[...] If one looks at the substance of the invention it is basically a computer program. The claim contains a reference to other elements, but it is the substance that matters, rather than a technical dissection of the claim - see Fujitsu Ltd's Application [1997] RPC 608 at 618. That substance is a computer program. Claim 1 describes its operation. Mr Macrossan's submissions seek to say that it is more than a computer program because the process involved ends up with the production of something - appropriate corporate documents. Other cases in which inventions have been held to be computer programs do not have such an end product, it is submitted. Mr Macrossan cited them in his submissions to the hearing officer and incorporates them into his submissions on this appeal. He cites Raytheon, Fujitsu (supra), Hutchins [2002] RPC 264 and others and says that none of them produced a physical end product. I do not regard that as being a distinguishing feature for present purposes. For example, while in Fujitsu the end product was apparently the display of a crystal, there is nothing to indicate that the result would have been any different if it had been a physical printout rather than a computer display. That is not, in my view, a basis for distinguishing those earlier cases.The full text of the original PCT application is available as Document WO2002/042953.The rejection in the UK does not come as a surprise to me. However, in the patent family there is also a co-pending European Patent Application No. 01997756 which, up to now, has not yet entered into effective substantial examination, i.e. there appears to be no examination report yet. I am curious to learn later on as to how the EPO will deal with that subject-matter. Out-Law.com writes:"[...] On the question of exclusions, the Judge explained that the approach taken by the Patents Office and the courts had changed in the time since [The Examiner] made her ruling. [...]"Technorati Tags: Patents
Readers may be interested to know that the program at issue in this case was the software underlying the website at http://www.ukcorporator.co.uk  Post a Comment
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