A quick post that checks on the state of play for computer-implemented inventions (“software patents”) at the European Patent Office. It has a quick look at some minor updates to the Guidelines for Examination and then reviews a few recent Board of Appeal cases.
Guidelines for Examination
After the overhaul of 2018, there are relatively few updates to the Guidelines for Examination for the 1 November 2019 edition. I go through those that relate to computer-implemented inventions below. I recommend viewing the links to the sections with the “Show modifications” check box ticked.
Section G-II, 3.3.1 on “Artificial intelligence and machine learning” has been tweaked to indicate that terms such as “support vector machine”, “reasoning engine” or “neural network” do not by themselves imply a technical means. They must be considered in context (i.e. make sure you describe a “hard” engineering problem and context).
Section G-II, 3.3 on “Mathematical methods” has a few minor changes.
It is stressed that special attention needs to be paid to the clarity of terms in claims that relate to mathematical methods. If terms are deemed to have “no well-recognised meaning” this may make it difficult to demonstrate a technical character (and so care should be taken to provide detailed functional definitions within the detailed description).
It is also added that mathematical methods may produce a technical effect when applied to a field of technology and/or adapted to a specific technical implementation. In this case, the “computational efficiency” of the steps of the methods may be taken into account when assessing inventive step. This is echoed in a minor update to section G-II, 3.6 on “Programs for computers”.
As also discussed below, the EPO is hinting that it might be a good idea to provide some actual experimental evidence to back up claims of increased efficiency when dealing with more abstract software-style inventions.
T 1248/12 – Data Privacy
T 1248/12 considers the field of data privacy.
In this case, the Board distinguished the field of data privacy from the field of data security. It was implied that the field of data security could give rise to technical solutions that provide an inventive step under Article 56 EPC. However, the field of data privacy was felt to relate to administrative, rather than technical, endeavours. In particular, the Board held that de-identifying data, by removing individually identifiable information, and by aggregating data from a plurality of sources, was not technical. It was felt that the claims related to data processing with a legal or administrative aim, rather than a technical one.
It is noted that the specification of the patent application was relatively light on concrete technical details – this may have led the Board to a negative opinion. The generalizations to the field of data privacy are perhaps too heavy-handed; there appears to be room to argue that some data privacy systems do contain technical features. In the light of this case, those drafting applications directed towards a data privacy aim may wish to determine if the technical effects may be recast in neighbouring data security fields.
T 0817/09 – Scoring a Document
T 0817/09 related to a computer implemented method for scoring a document.
The scoring was related to history data and was generated by monitoring signatures of the document, where the signatures were provided in the form of “term vectors”. As per similar linguistic processing cases discussed before, the “term vector” was found not to be “an inherently technical object” and “semantic similarity” was deemed to be a non-technical linguistic concept. The Board considered that solutions developed by the “notional mathematician” or the “notional computer programmer” would generally not be technical, whereas solutions developed by a digital signal processing engineer could be technical.
On the facts, the claimed methods were not found to provide any resource savings that could be presented as a technical, rather than linguistic effect. This does, however, suggest that providing evidence of technical improvements, e.g. reduced server processing times and/or reduced memory usage, may help applications with algorithmic subject matter.
T 0697/17 – Database Management Systems
T 0697/17 considered the patentability of SQL extensions within a relational database.
At first instance, the Examining Division held that the claim in question “entirely described a purely abstract method”. The Board disagreed: they held that the claim related to a method performed in a relational database system, which was a known form of software system within the field of computer science and as such would involve a computer system. The claim was thus not an abstract method. The Board noted that describing a technical feature at a high level of abstraction does not necessarily take away the feature’s technical character.
In consideration of inventive step, the Board cited T 1924/17, and stated that features make a technical contribution if they result from technical considerations on how to (for instance) improve processing speed, reduce the amount of memory required, improve availability or scalability, or reduce network traffic, when compared with the prior art or once added to the other features of the invention, and contribute in combination with technical features to achieve such an effect. However, effects and the respective features are non-technical if the effects are achieved by non-technical modifications to the underlying non-technical method or scheme (for example, a change of the business model, or a “pure algorithmic scheme”, i.e. an algorithmic scheme not based on technical considerations). The Board made an interesting distinction between a “programmer as such” and a “technical programmer”, and stated it was difficult to distinguish abstract algorithmic aspects that were non-technical and arose from the “programmer as such” from “technical programming” aspects that arose from the “technical programmer”.
Returning to T 1924/17, the Board concluded that a database management system is not a computer program as such but rather a technical system. The data structures used for providing access to data and for optimising and processing queries were deemed functional data structures and were held to purposively control the operation of the database management system and of the computer system to perform those technical tasks. While a database system is used to store non-technical information and database design usually involves information-modelling aspects, which do not contribute to solving a technical problem, the implementation of a database management system involves technical considerations. In the end, the case, which had been pending for 13 years, was remitted back to the Examining Division with an informally rap over the knuckles. It provides a useful citation for those drafting and prosecuting applications relating to database management systems.
IP Chimp 