Patent decision

BL number

O/164/11

Concerning rights in

GB1008621.8

Hearing Officer

Mr B Micklewright

Decision date

16 May 2011

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

The Court of Edinburgh Napier University

Provisions discussed

Patents Act 1977 section 1(2)

Keywords

Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

None

Summary

The invention related to carrying out digital forensic analysis of a digital computing system by collecting and analysing collected system call data so as to detect attack, intrusion or misuse of the system. Sequence matching techniques similar to those used in the bioinformatics field for protein and DNA sequence matching analysis are used to detect matches between a test sequence of system calls stored in a database and a sequence derived from the collected system call data so as to determine whether events of interest have taken place. The hearing officer found that the actual contribution was a program for a computer as such and a mathematical method as such and therefore lay solely in the excluded fields. He therefore refused the application.

Full decision O/164/11 34Kb