Patent decision

BL number

O/347/10

Concerning rights in

GB 0917486.3

Hearing Officer

Mr H Jones

Decision date

7 October 2010

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Intuit Inc

Provisions discussed

PA 1977 Section 1(2)(c)

Keywords

Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

None

Summary

The application relates to an application programming interface (API) that intercepts commands from the middle tier or business logic to a persistence tier or data store in a three tier programming model. On intercepting the command, the API identifies an entity (such as a specific data table) that is affected by the command and uses this to identify a function in the middle tier that is associated with both the entity and the command. An instruction is then sent to the middle tier to execute the function, and if the API receives confirmation that the function has been executed in the middle tier then the original command is executed at the persistence tier.

The Hearing Officer found that the invention related to a computer program and that it did not make a “technical contribution” required to prevent exclusion under section 1(2) of the Act. In coming to his decision the Hearing Officer considered the decision in Symbian and found that the claims did not provide a better, more reliable or efficient computer. He also considered the signposts of Lewison J in AT&T/CVON and found that the programming model did not constitute an architecture and that the application was circumventing rather than solving the problem of lack of communication between development teams. In summary, any contribution lay within the application and that the underlying computing system was nothing more than a general purpose computing system.