Patent decision

BL number

O/280/02

Concerning rights in

GB0008530.8

Hearing Officer

Mr P Marchant

Decision date

17 July 2002

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

The Sporting Exchange Ltd

Provisions discussed

PA 1977 section 1

Keywords

Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

None

Summary

The invention concerns an Internet based betting system which allows customers to bet with each other rather than with a bookmaker. Customers make offers or requests to bet on a particular event, stating the odds and the amount they wish to bet and other customers accept the offers, accepting the proposed odds and either the whole or part of the amount. The system provides the opportunity to 'lay' an outcome, that is to bet that an outcome will not occur and matches requests from some customers to back a given outcome, with offers from other customers to lay the same outcome, only accepting the requests when a match is found. The system can automatically generate 'implied' bets if the bet requests placed by customers do not cover all events to increase the betting opportunities offered. And it ensures that a customer placing a bet has sufficient funds in his account to meet any possible liability.

The applicant argued that the provision of an innovative betting system in conventional hardware system was necessarily a technical system, alternatively that a technical advance clearly lay in the data handling operations 'receiving and aggregating information arriving at a server from different users over a communications network and providing the aggregated information to said users as a basis for further decisions by the users' or in the 'engine' of the betting system comprising these data handling elements divorced from the betting context. The invention was found to be a method of doing business and therefore excluded from patentability by section 1(2) of the Act.