Patent decision

BL number

O/058/05

Concerning rights in

GB 0318627.7

Hearing Officer

Mrs S E Chalmers

Decision date

4 March 2005

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Educational Testing Services

Provisions discussed

Section 1 (2) (c)

Keywords

Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

None

Summary

The application relates to a computerised method of analysing an essay to provide eg a thesis statement and comprises a computer program which looks for predefined words, phrases, sentence positions, etc and uses predefined probabilities to pick out a sentence which contains eg the thesis statement.

It was held that the invention claimed in the specification was a method of performing a mental act and/or a computer program and that there was no technical contribution that would prevent its exclusion from patentability.

Full decision O/058/05 37Kb