NIPC Law

As I have to present a talk for our seminar on Software Patents after Symbian and Bilski  in Liverpool on 5 Feb 2009 I thought I would have a look at the Comptroller's decisions since Symbian Ltd v Comptroller-General   [2008] EWCA Civ 1066 to see whether there had been any change in the Office's approach to software and business method patents since the CA's decision. The official line from the IP O is that this case has not made much difference.   In "Applying the  Aerotel/Macrossan Test"  the Office revisited four cases that had been decided before Symbian  an d concluded that they would have been decided in exactly the same way now.  And yet I wonder. Only  one case has come before an hearing officer since Symbian and that was a win for the applicant. In January Patent Ltd.'s application  the invention was a combined electronic point of sale device for buying credits for mobile telephones. The examiner had rejected the application on the grounds that the...

Possibly the most important intellectual property decision of this year from the point of view of British business will be the Court of Appeal's decision in Symbian Ltd v Comptroller General of Patents [2008] EWCA Civ 1066 (8 Oct 2008). In that judgment the CA affirmed Mr. Justice  Patten's decision to allow an appeal from the hearing officer, Mrs. Chalmers, who had upheld the examiner's objection that an application for a patent for  "a method of accessing data in a computing device and, in particular to a method of accessing data held in a dynamic link library in the computing device. The present invention also relates to a computing device controlled by the method" was excluded from patentability by s.1 (2) of the Patents Act 1977 on the ground that it related to a computer program "as such" (see Symbian Ltd . 30 July 2007).  Why Symbian is important The commercial significance of the CA's decision is that it opens the way for patents for at lea...