Patent decision

BL number

O/502/12

Concerning rights in

GB0802816.9

Hearing Officer

Mr P Slater

Decision date

18 December 2012

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Plastic Logic Limited

Provisions discussed

PA 1977 Section 1(2)

Keywords

Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

None

Summary

The invention relates to an electronic document reader and an associated method for formatting or optimising pages, or images of pages, for display on the reader. Essentially, the invention is designed to remove the wasted areas around the margins of the page, to the extent they can be removed without losing information from the pages such as the page numbers. This is achieved by analysing the pages to determine the smallest margin which can be removed from the pages prior to displaying them. This gives the appearance that the page fills the whole of the display screen, with the border of the display effectively replacing the traditional page margins. Re-formatting the pages in this way optimises the size of the content, and ensures that similar scales are applied across all the pages so that the text does not shrink or grow as the user moves between the pages. Formatting of the pages maybe achieved using a conventional printer driver associated with the reader to manipulate the pages or alternatively pages may be manipulated remotely and then downloaded onto the reader. Remote manipulation of the pages requires less processing on the part of the reader and has the potential to lower its power consumption and increase its battery life.

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 and the presentation of information as such, and having found no technical contribution refused the application under Section 18(3).