Patent decision

BL number

O/290/12

Concerning rights in

GB1017911.7

Hearing Officer

Mr P Slater

Decision date

30 July 2012

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Andrzej Stochniol

Provisions discussed

PA 1977 Section 1(2)

Keywords

Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

None

Summary

The invention relates to financial schemes for reducing the emission of greenhouse gases from vehicles engaged in international trade. In particular, the application describes a method for recording and reporting fuel consumption for vehicles travelling between different geographical areas. Various proposals exist for using so-called “emission fees” to control and drive down fuel consumption in international maritime transport and aviation. However, previous proposals suffer in two respects. Firstly, whilst it is not technically difficult to measure emissions on a small-scale, it becomes far more complex to record and report emissions from several thousand vehicles on a global scale. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it has become ever more politically difficult to apportion the cost of emissions to their respective countries.

It is widely acknowledged that aviation and maritime emissions are driven by the level of international trade, and that this is controlled by consumer demand, and that therefore a country’s share of emissions should be related to its level of imports. However, for example, container ships often transport goods to many different countries during the same voyage which makes a direct calculation of emissions attributable to different goods and/or countries an administratively complex task. What the applicant has done is to devise a new method of recording fuel consumption for a given type of vehicle, carrying goods between two or more countries over a period of time which are stored in an electronic registry. These records are then used to attribute fuel consumption and emissions to particular geographical areas using a predetermined usage-to-area attribution rule. The results can then be reported and used to calculate emission fees for a market-based emission reduction scheme aimed at reducing vehicle emissions globally.

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 business method and a computer program as such, and having found no technical contribution refused the application under Section 18(3).