NIPC Law

Supreme Court of the United Kingdom Author Kelsey Farish Licence CC BY 4,0   Source Wikimedia Commons   J ane Lambert Supreme Court (Lord Briggs, Lord Hamblen, Lord Leggatt, Lord Stephens, and Lord Kitchin) Emotional Perception AI Ltd. v Comptroller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks   [2026] UKSC 3 This was an appeal by Emotional Appeal AI Limited ("the applicant") against the Court of Appeal's decision in  Emotional Perception AI Ltd v Comptroller-General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks   [2024] Bus LR 14, [2023] WLR(D) 500, [2023] EWHC 2948 (Ch) (21 Nov 2023) to uphold the examiner's objection to the patentability of the applicant's invention. I discussed the Court of Appeal's reasoning in  Patents - the Appeal in Comptroller v Emotional Perceptions   on 26 Aug 2024. The Invention The applicant applied to the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office for a patent for a method of training a neural network to reflect emotional perc...

In  HTC Europe Co Ltd v Apple Inc [2013] EWCA Civ 451 (3 May 2013), the Court of Appeal (Lord Justices Richards, Lewison and Kitchin) ventured again into what Lord Justice Lewison described at paragraph [140] of the Court's judgment as "the minefield of the exclusion from patentability of computer programs 'as such'". The Appeal This was an appeal from the judgment of Mr Justice Floyd (as he then was) in  HTC Europe Co Ltd v Apple Inc [2012] EWHC 1789 (Pat) (4 July 2012). The judge found that two of the claims of one of Apple's patents were invalid because they related to computer programs as such and one of those claims was also invalid for obviousness. He also found that all the claims of another patent were invalid either for want of novelty or obviousness.  The first of those patents, European patent number 2,098.948 , related to computer devices with touch sensitive screens that are capable of responding to more than one touch at a time. The second, E...