Patent decision

BL number

O/181/07

Concerning rights in

GB 0422482.0

Hearing Officer

Mr R C Kennell

Decision date

27 June 2007

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Makor Issues and Rights Limited

Provisions discussed

PA 1977 sections 1(2), 17(5), 97(1) and 101

Keywords

Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

None

Summary

The claims related to a marketing decision support computer system for large retail organisations which optimised the prediction of revenue and profit in pricing and promotion strategies by using a statistical model to perform data mining on historical sales data and taking into account other influences. Applying the Aerotel/Macrossan test, the hearing officer held that, notwithstanding the form of the claims, the contribution as a matter of substance related solely to a computer program, to a business method (despite the applicant’s argument that it merely supported business decisions) and to a mathematical method. It was not therefore necessary to consider whether the contribution was technical in nature. However the hearing officer thought that the invention was not to do with solving a technical problem or producing a technical improvement, or with a technical combination of hardware and software; he thought the hardware was entirely conventional and that the invention was fundamentally about how a computer system was programmed.

The applicant had also disagreed with the examiner’s decision to report under s. 17(5)(b) that search would serve no useful purpose. The hearing officer held that, even if this was a matter for him to review having regard to ss. 97(1) and 101 (on which he made no decision), he saw no reason to criticise the action taken by the examiner and was not persuaded that a search needed to be done to identify possible technical differences between the invention and the prior art.