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EPO


PREACHING AND PRACTICE: CII PATENTING


Jacqueline Needle Beck Greener


A decision of the English High Court has led the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) to issue a new practice notice that instructs UK examiners to take a much narrower view of the “mental act” exclusion to patentability. However—and perhaps most significantly— the decision has confirmed that programmed computers are patentable in the UK. It also highlighted that when assessing the patentability of computer-implemented inventions (CIIs), UKIPO and European Patent Office (EPO) practice is different, although it is hoped that in both jurisdictions the same conclusion would be reached, albeit with different reasoning.


Patentability


The UK Patents Act and the European Patent Convention (EPC) both require that there must be an “invention” and that for something to be patentable, the invention should be both new and non-obvious. There is no definition of “invention”, but inventions must be “capable of industrial application”, which means that they are technical rather than abstract. Additionally, specific items are excluded from patentability. These include computer programs, methods for performing mental acts and mathematical methods. These are excluded only if the invention relates to an excluded item “as such”.


Te EPO has been much clearer than the UKIPO (and the English courts) in deeming that patent claims draſted to relate to programmed computers and to storage media carrying a program are acceptable subject matter for patents. For many years it has been accepted that for a CII to be patentable, the contribution that the invention makes to the prior art has to have a “technical effect” or display a “technical character”.


The Halliburton decision


In October 2011, the English High Court case Halliburton v Comptroller reviewed the law relating to CIIs and the judge, His Honour Judge


120 World Intellectual Property Review e-Digest 2012


Colin Birss, sitting as a judge of the English High Court, confirmed that: “A computer programmed to perform a task which makes a contribution to the art which is technical in nature is a patentable invention and may be claimed as such.”


He accepted that there was a difference between the way English courts, and the UKIPO, approach patentability when compared to the EPO. However, he noted that there was also a difference between the way that English courts and the EPO approach inventive step, and he hoped that the differences would combine in such a way that the same facts in each jurisdiction would result in the same conclusion.


The mental act exclusion


Although Halliburton is particularly helpful in its review of the patentability of CIIs, its immediate effect has been to alter the manner in which the UKIPO treats the mental act exclusion.


The case was an appeal from the UKIPO Comptroller General with respect to Halliburton’s patent applications for the design of roller cone drill bits that are used to drill oil wells. The invention as described and claimed used a computer simulation of the interaction of the drill bit with the material being drilled, so that the design features of the drill bit could be optimised. The claim did not include a manufacturing step, but it did include steps involving making various calculations and making comparisons between two designs.


The Halliburton applications had been refused by the UKIPO on the grounds that the method fell within the mental act exclusion, but the UKIPO used a wide approach to the exclusion.


The wide interpretation of the exclusion, rejected by the judge in the Halliburton case, considers a method to be an excluded mental act if it is capable of being performed mentally regardless of whether, as claimed, it is actually performed mentally. All computers that are


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