NIPC Law

  Jane Lambert Intellectual Property Enterprise Court (HH Judge Melissa Clarke) Communisis Plc v The TALL Group of Companies Ltd and others [2020] EWHC 3089 (IPEC) (17 Nov 2020) This was a claim for patent infringement and a counterclaim for revocation on grounds of obviousness and excluded matter. The action and counterclaim came on for trial before Judge Melissa Clarke on 14 and 15 July 2920. By her judgment of 17 Nov 2020 she found the patent to be invalid and not to have been infringed (see  Communisis Plc v The TALL Group of Companies Ltd and other s [2020] EWHC 3089 (IPEC) (17 Nov 2020). The Parties The claimant was Communisis Plc, the proprietor of UK patent no GB2512450   entitled "A method of generating a payment/credit instrument", the patent in suit.  The defendants were The TALL Group of Companies Ltd and its wholly-owned subsidiaries, Checkprint Ltd, and DLRT Limited.  Each party manufactures cheques, cheque books and cheque fraud prevention systems...

Intellectual Property Office Crown copyright: all rights reserved, reproduced with kind permission of the  IPO Jane Lambert Intellectual Property Office (Mrs C L Davies) Re Adobe Systems Inc.'s Application   O/549/19 19 Sept 2019 This was an appeal by Adobe Systems Incorporated against the examiner's refusal to allow its application for a patent  for a method and system for recommending software actions to create an image and recommending images to demonstrate the effects of software actions to proceed to grant. The examiner objected to the application on the grounds that it was for a program for a computer and a mathematical method within the meaning of s.1 (2) (a) and (c) of the Patents Act 1977. That subsection declares that mathematical methods and programs for computers among other things are not inventions for the purposes of the Act but that declaration is subject to the proviso that it "shall prevent anything from being treated as a...

Lantana Ltd . ( "Lantana" ) is a California company that offers communication cable services, telephone systems and services and computer and data network services mainly to customers in Southern California . One of the company's employees invented a "method, systems, and computer program products for retrieving a file of machine readable data" for which Lantana applied for patents in the USA and around the world under the Patent Co-operation Treaty. The Invention  The invention is described in the abstract of the application as follows: "A user, wishing to retrieve a file of machine-readable data from a remote machine-readable data storage device, transmits a first e-mail message from a local station to a remote station via a packet switched network. The first e-mail message includes a first machine-readable instruction and a first machine-readable retrieval criterion. The remote station receives the first e-mail message from the packet ...

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...

The first decision from the Comptroller for 2010 offers an interesting discussion on how to assess an invention's technical contribution when applying the Aerotel/Macrossan and Symbian guidelines. In Fisher Rosemount Systenms Inc. Application BL 0/003/10 12 Jan 2010 the applicant appealed against the examiner's report that the claims of the invention were excluded from patentability because they related to a computer program as such. The invention related to a process control system and in particular to a method of accessing process control data, viewing and modifying that data and using the modified data to update control programs within the system. The invention described a method by which the operator is able to develop and to add functionality to his or her own applications at any time without the need to rewrite or compile the control system software. The applicant claimed: "A system for accessing process control data, comprising: a pre-generated partial class th...