Patent decision

BL number

O/045/07

Concerning rights in

GB 0219156.7

Hearing Officer

Mr R C Kennell

Decision date

12 February 2007

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Canon Kabushiki Kaisha

Provisions discussed

PA 1977 Section 1(2)

Keywords

Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

None

Summary

The invention was a refinement of probabilistic latent

semantic analysis (a technique allowing the probability of a term occurring within a document to be evaluated by means of latent or hidden factors that could be extracted from a set of documents and used to represent the content of the documents and the meaning of terms), which allowed the user to supply prior information in order to cluster and extract well-defined topics. The hearing officer, applying the four-step test in Aerotel/Macrossan [2006] EWHC Civ 1371, held that the invention related to a computer program as such and therefore failed the third step. He considered that the applicant’s arguments, submitted before Aerotel/Macrossan and intended to show that the invention made a technical contributuion and was therefore patentable, no longer carried any force. The hearing officer did not consider that the invention related to a mathematical method as such, and made no decision on whether it related to a mental act as such.

Full decision O/045/07 46Kb