Patent decision

BL number
O/192/07
Concerning rights in
GB0311200.0
Hearing Officer
Mr R C Kennell
Decision date
11 July 2007
Person(s) or Company(s) involved
Acres Gaming Incorporated
Provisions discussed
PA 1977 sections 1(1), 1(2)
Keywords
Excluded fields (refused), Inventive step
Related Decisions
None

Summary

It was known for casinos to issue their own identification cards for use by players of gaming machines, but the invention allowed information to be read from a pre-existing card such as a driver’s licence or credit card and used, without decrypting it, to identify whether the player had an account. The claims related to methods and apparatus for selecting a pre-existing account or establishing a new account, and to computer programs which instructed a computer to perform such methods. The hearing officer refused the application for lack of patentability.

Thus, notwithstanding a prior US specification disclosing the use of a pre-existing card but whose information required decryption in order to be used, the hearing officer (applying the Aerotel/Macrossan test) did not consider the contribution to lie solely in the use of non-decrypted information irrespective of its source, but thought it relied also on a recognition that encrypted information on a pre-existing card could be used in this way. He therefore held the contribution to relate solely to a computer program only in the case of the program claims, and held it to relate solely to a business method in the case of the method and apparatus claims.

On inventive step, the examiner had drawn a close parallel between the invention and known systems for identifying account holders in databases (eg using dates of birth, randomly generated account numbers or e-mail addresses). However the hearing officer did not consider this sufficed to show lack of inventive step.

Full decision O/192/07 PDF document48Kb