Patent decision

BL number

O/117/07

Concerning rights in

GB 0507837.3

Hearing Officer

Mr R C Kennell

Decision date

30 April 2007

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Benesse Corporation and Susumu Fujimori

Provisions discussed

PA 1977 Section 1(2)

Keywords

Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

None

Summary

The application related to a computer-based system for evaluating tests. Applying the Aerotel/Macrossan test, the hearing officer held the contribution of the invention to be the use of a “partial score” model to provide a simpler algorithm for the assessment of test scores which did not yield binary “correct/false” answers, requiring less memory and imposing a lower processing burden than the “graded response” model previously used. However this failed the third step of the test because it related solely to a computer program and/or to a mathematical method. On this, the hearing officer held:

1. the increase in processing speed did not take contribution outside excluded matter, since this arose from the way the system was programmed;

2. the contribution did not lie in the field of test systems and was simply a computer program up and running (as in the Macrossan appeal);

3. the fact that the algorithm was used for writing computer instructions did not necessarily mean that it could not be a mathematical method as such.

Despite the applicants’ arguments to the contrary, the hearing officer did not consider it necessary to go on to the fourth step and consider whether the contribution was technical in nature: he did not accept that the increased processing speed and lower memory requirement were saving technical features since they arose wholly from the way the computer was programmed. Nor was the hearing officer persuaded that the invention was patentable by analogy with previous patents for speech recognition and image processing characterised by a new algorithm.