Patent decision
- BL number
- O/761/19
- Concerning rights in
- GB1610166.9
- Hearing Officer
- Mrs S E Chalmers
- Decision date
- 12 December 2019
- Person(s) or Company(s) involved
- Adobe Systems Incorporated
- Provisions discussed
- Patents Act 1977 Section 1(2)
- Keywords
- Excluded fields (refused)
- Related Decisions
- None
Summary
The application provides techniques whereby clickstream data of interactions with online resources by unknown visitors are associated with known visitors. A visitor identification module identifies individuals using an information retrieval model based on features of clickstream data which correspond to attributes of web traffic and are selected for completeness, consistency and uniqueness. Weights are associated with each factor to tune the influence of different factors on a relevance score. If a threshold score is achieved the clickstream data is merged with a profile of that individual.
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/761/19 272Kb