Patent decision

BL number

O/198/06

Concerning rights in

GB0105616.7

Hearing Officer

Mr A Bartlett

Decision date

19 July 2006

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Touch Clarity Limited

Provisions discussed

PA 1977 sections 1(2)(a) 1(2)(c)

Keywords

Excluded fields (allowed), Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

None

Summary

The claims concern a controller for controlling a system to carry out one of a range of candidate actions so that an objective function of the system is optimized. A candidate action is selected so as to minimize the growth in regret. This was taken to mean that the system selects the next candidate action by balancing previous experience of performed actions with a degree of exploration of other candidate actions.

The Hearing Officer held that the correct approach was the one originally formulated by Mr Peter Prescott QC in CFPH LLC's Application [2006] RPC 5 and broadly endorsed by a number of subsequent High Court judgments, namely, identify the contribution and ask whether it falls solely within the excluded areas. The invention was felt to lie in an optimization process which, following the reasoning in Vicom and Halliburton, was not of itself patentable, but could form the basis of a patentable claim if suitably tied to a technical application i.e. controlling a robot. However, the Hearing Officer found that at least some of the claims were bad as they encompassed both excluded and non-excluded subject matter.