Patent decision

BL number

O/295/07

Concerning rights in

GB0326276.3

Hearing Officer

Mr R C Kennell

Decision date

5 October 2007

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

eSpeed, Inc

Provisions discussed

PA 1977 section 1(2) GB 0326276.3

Keywords

Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

None

Summary

Following Aerotel/Macrossan [2006] EWCA Civ 1371, the hearing officer found the contribution of the invention, whether claimed as method or apparatus, to be the display of an interactive trading dialog box in response to user selection of a portion of a graph representing a financial instrument, the dialog box being configured to accept particular trading instructions. He found nothing in the contribution that was not within the computer program and business method exclusions of section 1(2). In particular, he did not accept a claim to a computer system which the applicant proposed by analogy with the claims allowed in the successful Aerotel appeal, distinguishing from Aerotel on the ground that there was no new hardware. The contribution therefore failed the third step of the Aerotel/Macrossan test and it was not necessary to consider whether it was technical in nature. The application was refused.

Full decision O/295/07 43Kb