Patent decision

BL number

O/264/07

Concerning rights in

GB0515579.1, GB0516374.6, GB0516995.8, GB0516997.4, GB0518016.1, GB0519238.0, GB0519365.1 and GB0519463.4

Hearing Officer

Mr A Bartlett

Decision date

12 September 2007

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Rajesh Kapur

Provisions discussed

Section 1(2)

Keywords

Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

None

Summary

The applications form a series of applications filed by Mr Kapur relating to Document Management Systems where documents can be recovered following deletion or overwrite operations, working systems can be recovered after a fault occurs in a system having some redundancy or system changes can be tested offline before being implemented in a live system.

The Hearing Officer applied the four step test from the Court of Appeal in Aerotel Ltd vs Telco Holdings Ltd (and others) and Macrossan’s application [2007] RPC 7. For GB0519365.1, which was agreed to be representative, the contribution made by the invention was identified as a document management system permitting the recovery both of documents that have been deleted and documents that have been overwritten and in which deleted and overwritten documents are stored separately. The Hearing Officer concluded that this contribution fell solely in excluded matter as a computer program as such and, if the claims covered manual implementation, to a mental act as such. The remaining applications were all refused on the same grounds.