Patent decision

BL number

O/303/19

Concerning rights in

GB1513017.2

Hearing Officer

Mrs S E Chalmers

Decision date

31 May 2019

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Adobe Inc

Provisions discussed

Patents Act 1977 Section 1(2)

Keywords

Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

O/302/19, O/304/19

Summary

The invention provides an alleged contribution of a method of replacing a current policy used to select advertisements with a new policy which is predicted to exceed a threshold of performance, such as in terms of revenue, number of selections and/or number of conversions, with a defined level of confidence from statistical guarantees; the new policy being identified by line searching a plurality of policies expressed using high-dimensional vectors in a direction in a policy space that is expected to point towards a region where policies are predicted to exceed the performance threshold; then selecting and communicating an advertisement to a client device using the new policy.

The Hearing Officer applied the four-step approach set out in Aerotel/Macrossan in the light of the judgments in Symbian, AT&T and HTC amongst others and found that the invention was excluded as a method of doing business and program for a computer as such. The application was refused.

Full decision O/303/19 189Kb