Patent decision

BL number

O/528/16

Concerning rights in

GB1416791.0 (GB2521717 A)

Hearing Officer

Mr B Buchanan

Decision date

14 November 2016

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Synchronoss Technologies, Inc.

Provisions discussed

section 1(2)

Keywords

Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

None

Summary

The application in suit is concerned with automatically identifying and notifying people about particular events (such as the arrival of a celebrity or host) called “event scenes” occurring at “group events” such as a company offsite activity, a wedding, a sports event or a street festival. The claimed invention processes content generated and submitted by users to a network-based content-sharing service (such as a social media service) and identifies location and timing data from associated metadata and the rate of submissions. Users may then be notified of spontaneous event scenes, or event scenes which are a departure from a schedule at a group event. The Hearing Officer followed the four step test in Aerotel/Macrossan and considered arguments that the present application provided an improved notification to a user at a remote terminal that an event is taking place, akin to the improved inappropriate communication alarm generation of PKTWO. Unlike PKTWO which was held to solve a technical problem, the present invention was found to be implemented by a program for a computer and to solve a business problem, albeit one which is external to the computer. The Hearing Officer confirmed that the AT&T signposts did not suggest a technical contribution and found the application to be excluded under section 1(2).

Full decision O/528/16 96Kb