Patent decision

BL number

O/421/10

Concerning rights in

GB0509900.7

Hearing Officer

Mr P Slater

Decision date

6 December 2010

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Hewlett Packard Development Company.

Provisions discussed

PA 1977 Section 1(2)

Keywords

Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

None

Summary

The invention relates to editing tools which can be used to prepare documents for high volume printing applications such as the preparation and printing of newspapers. In such cases, it is often desirable to share documents, for example, advertisements and/or news articles across a number of different publications with different in-house styles and layouts. This process is known as “syndication” and often requires the text to be re-formatted.

However, problems occur when articles are shared or syndicated between different publications when it becomes necessary to alter the attributes of the text associated with that article e.g. its structure, style or geometry in order to match the in-house style of the publication and enable it to be inserted in the appropriate place or copyhole. The invention itself provides an improved editing tool which is capable of identifying and labeling document portions or text, tagging the document portion with information (metadata) defining the content, structure and layout of the associated text which can then be exported in a platform-independent format for use in a different editing tool to generate the corresponding article in another publication.

The Hearing Officer considered the four-step test in Aerotel/Macrossan in the light of the Symbian judgment, and found the contribution to relate to a computer program as such, and having found no technical contribution refused the application under Section 18(3).