Patent decision

BL number
O/276/07
Concerning rights in
GB0329930.2
Hearing Officer
Mr J Elbro
Decision date
18 September 2007
Person(s) or Company(s) involved
International Business Machines Corporation
Provisions discussed
PA Act 1977 Section 1(2)
Keywords
Excluded fields (refused)
Related Decisions
None

Summary

The application related to a system for managing transactions in a distributed computing system. The claims were concerned with managing work done in an application, such as a legacy database, which used an environment different from the overall distributed application architecture. A transaction wrapper was used to allow all the transaction control to be handled by the distributed architecture. The hearing officer followed the four-step approach to the assessment of patentability under section 1(2) approved by the Court of Appeal in Aerotel/Macrossan [2006] EWCA Civ 1371 in determining whether the invention was excluded from patentability. He held that the contribution defined by the claims was an improved transaction management system. This system being a collection of computer programs, he held that the claims were excluded.

Full decision O/276/07 PDF document51Kb