Patent decision

BL number

O/102/06

Concerning rights in

GB 02385441

Hearing Officer

Mr S Probert

Decision date

12 April 2006

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Intuwave Limited

Provisions discussed

PA1977 Sections 1(2)(c) . Article 52 EPC

Keywords

Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

None

Summary

The invention relates to an application programming environment in a "resource constrained" mobile telephone. It proposes the use of a runtime library comprising three types of code which enable a wide range of different applications to be constructed. These three types of code form what is described as a "restricted set of mandatory primitives" that are capable of being combined with additional code (called "glue logic") to create different applications. These primitives occupy very little code space, and this means that any primitives that are common to several applications can be burnt to ROM.

The Hearing Officer agreed that the test for patentability is as set out RiM v Inpro, ie. "Taking the claims correctly construed, what does the claimed invention contribute to the art outside excluded subject matter?" He concluded that the substance of the invention is a better way of writing a computer program, and that therefore the contribution to the art that is made by this invention is entirely within excluded subject matter - ie. programs for computers as such.

Full decision O/102/06 32Kb