Patent decision
- BL number
- O/293/06
- Concerning rights in
- GB 0427297.7
- Hearing Officer
- Mr R C Kennell
- Decision date
- 18 September 2006
- Person(s) or Company(s) involved
- Acres Gaming Incorporated
- Provisions discussed
- PA 1977 sections 1(2), 2(3)
- Keywords
- Excluded fields (refused)
- Related Decisions
- O/112/06
Summary
The claims related to an apparatus for gaming which was networked to a host computer and allocated players to levels each with an associated amount beyond which a player would be given an award. The nearest prior art was the applicant’s published application which lay in the section 2(3) field and had been refused in an earlier decision BL O/112/06 as a method of playing a game. The hearing officer did not accept the applicant’s argument that section 1(2) did not bite in such a situation, and did not think that, for the purpose of assessing what was the advance made by the invention in the present case, anything turned on whether a document in the section 2(3) field should be disregarded.
Applying the test in CFPH LLP’s Application, the hearing officer considered that the advance was excluded as a method of playing a game for the same reasons as in O/112/06. He did not accept arguments (i) that the advance differed from the earlier case because the assigning of player levels with an associated reward constituted a technical advance which avoided the complexity of entering different variables for every player as in the earlier case, (ii) that the advance took the invention into away from playing the game as such and into the area of giving a reward after the game had been played, and (iii) that the earlier case was distinguished because it centred on decisions made during the game itself. Distinguishing Macrossan’s Application, the hearing officer also held that the invention was excluded as a method for doing business, being much more about how the gaming system was set up by a casino operator to encourage particular patterns of play than it was about providing a tool or an end product. He also held the invention excluded as a computer program finding no technical contribution over and above a programmed computer; in his view the “little man” test in CFPH broke down in a case like this where the little man supposedly operating the controls could not be brought into play without defeating the purpose of the invention.
Full decision O/293/06 
41Kb
