Patent decision

BL number

O/194/04

Concerning rights in

GB 0406044.8

Hearing Officer

Mr A C Howard

Decision date

7 July 2004

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Neal Solomon

Provisions discussed

PA 1977 section 1(2)(c)

Keywords

Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

O/195/04

Summary

The application concerned a computer-implemented system for procurement similar to a reverse auction, in which purchasers place requests for bids to sell an item from vendors. The items procured are purchaser-specified bundles of items, and the vendors bids are composed of sub-bids to sell each item in the bundle. The items within the bundle finally procured may thus consist of items from different vendors. The requests for bids are pooled by the system until a certain threshold is reached before being submitted to the vendors. This pooling allows the purchasers to receive special terms of sale, such as a 'bulk buying' discount.

It was argued that requesting sub-bids for items within a purchaser-specified bundle provided a technical contribution because the purchaser was able to procure an optimised bundle made up of items from different vendors, based on the best sub-bids received. It was also submitted that pooling requests for bids required a technical advance in the computer software used, and that the question was analogous to that of the technical problem of the allocation of resources in a computer system. The Hearing Officer rejected these arguments, concluding that the claimed invention related to no more than the computer-implementation of an improved business method involving nothing beyond routine programming considerations.

Full decision O/194/04 30Kb