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 PDF document272Kb