Patent decision

BL number

O/841/22

Concerning rights in

GB1915026.7 and GB1913243.0

Hearing Officer

Mr H Jones

Decision date

29 September 2022

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

AON Risk Services, Inc. of Maryland

Provisions discussed

The Patents Act 1977, section 1(2)

Keywords

Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

None

Summary

The inventions of these two applications relate to receiving a plurality of documents, particularly patent documents, performing some pre-processing of the text of those documents, and thereby generating some analysis to present to a user. GB1915026.7 relates to determining scores relating to breadth of monopoly claim, the number of similar documents that pre-date the patent and also the nature of subject-matter it relates to. GB1913243.0 relates to being able to determine the breadth of document portions compared to other portions, for example in determining whether one monopoly claim is broader than another.

The Hearing Officer applied the four-step approach set out in Aerotel/Macrossan and used the five signposts set out in AT&T/CVON. He found the inventions to be excluded, and therefore refused both applications.

Full decision O/841/22 238Kb