Patent decision

BL number

O/033/09

Concerning rights in

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

Hearing Officer

Mr J Elbro

Decision date

6 February 2009

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Mr Rajesh Kapur

Provisions discussed

Section 1(2)

Keywords

Estoppel, Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

[2007] UKIntelP o26407

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.

These cases had been refused by a previous hearing officer’s decision (O/264/07) but that decision had been partly overturned on appeal to the Patents Court. The judge upheld the previous decision that the claims were excluded as computer programs as such but overturned the finding that a manual implementation would be excluded as a mental act and the applications were remitted for further processing. That further examination led to the present hearing where, with the exception of some additional dependent claims in one application, the claims on the applications were the same as had been previously considered.

The hearing officer held that as a result of the previous litigation, estoppel by record prevented Mr Kapur from arguing that the claims escaped exclusion as computer programs as such. This applied both to the original claims and the proposed amended claims, which still related to a computer implementation, on which the first hearing officer’s decision had been upheld.