Patent decision

BL number

O/033/08

Concerning rights in

GB0404760.1

Hearing Officer

Mr R C Kennell

Decision date

6 February 2008

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Fisher-Rosemount Systems, Inc

Provisions discussed

PA 1977 section 1(2)

Keywords

Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

None

Summary

The claims related to a distributed process control system and a method of communicating data through networks in the system, wherein intermediate data servers having associated data sources distributed information over one or more communication networks for local access and execution by client applications. The hearing officer held the contribution to be the operation of the system in such a way that, upon a determination that information requested at an intermediate server was not contained in the associated data source, the request was sent to another intermediate server together with further information likely to be requested as determined by using a database access pattern. The hearing officer held that this was excluded as relating solely to a computer program, and that the claims were not sufficiently tethered to process control to avoid the exclusion. He did not think that there was any new physical combination of hardware as in the Aerotel special exchange (for which see Aerotel/Macrossan [2006] EWCA Civ 1371). He also distinguished the case from previous Office decisions 010/07, 148/07, 150/07 and 307/07 allowing some claims in computer program-related inventions.

Full decision O/033/08 39Kb