Patent decision

BL number
O/238/07
Concerning rights in
GB0414075.2
Hearing Officer
Mrs S E Chalmers
Decision date
20 August 2007
Person(s) or Company(s) involved
Symbian Ltd
Provisions discussed
PA 1977 Section 1(2)
Keywords
Excluded fields (refused)
Related Decisions
None

Summary

The application relates to a method of enabling an application running on an operating system on a portable computing device to access files stored on removable storage medium. Memory on different devices is typically managed according to different directory structures. In practice, this means that a file request from a device running on one manufacturer’s operating system will not be recognized by a removable storage medium made by another manufacturer which uses a different memory directory structure. The invention addresses this problem of incompatibility by getting the file system to start looking from a different level in the hierarchy in the storage medium directory structure for the requested file without the need for string substitution. The hearing officer applied the four part test set out in the Aerotel and Macrossan judgment, found the invention to be excluded as a computer program as such, and refused the application.

Full decision O/238/07 PDF document48Kb