Patent decision

BL number

O/566/14

Concerning rights in

GB1312146.2

Hearing Officer

Mr P Slater

Decision date

23 December 2014

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Recipero Ltd

Provisions discussed

PA 1977 Section 1(2)

Keywords

Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

None

Summary

The invention relates to a system for generating electronic security documents on a computing system. The invention provides a new method for generating and storing a security document in a multi-node network in which the document is assigned a unique document identifier including amongst other things a process identifier, and a node identifier providing an indication of the node where the security document was created. This has the effect of reducing the amount of network traffic as it is no longer necessary to check for the creation of duplicate document identifiers on different nodes. In a further embodiment, the security document and document identifier are said to be stored in a database on the same computing node which generated the document. The document identifier thereby providing, by way of the node identifier, an indication of the location in which the document has been stored. This is said to improve the speed with which the document is retrieved, as there is no need for a centralised indexing.

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).