Patent decision

BL number

O/366/09

Concerning rights in

GB0814367.9, GB0814366.1 and GB0814365.3

Hearing Officer

Mr B Micklewright

Decision date

20 November 2009

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Fisher-Rosemount Systems, Inc

Provisions discussed

Patents Act 1977 section 1(2)

Keywords

Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

O/214/09

Summary

These applications were divided from GB 0621389.6 (“the parent application”), an application which was refused in decision BL O/214/09 as relating to a program for a computer as such. The inventions all relate to a method of modifying process control data by converting it first to a “format-neutral” data format, in these cases an extensible mark-up language (XML) format. The format-neutral data can then be converted into a variety of further formats for editing purposes. The parent application and divisional applications all related to various aspects of this method.

Applying the Aerotel/Macrossan test, the hearing officer for the present applications found that the arguments made by the hearing officer in the case of the parent application also applied to each of the inventions claimed in the three divisional applications and therefore for each application the contribution made by the respective invention fell solely within excluded matter. The applications were therefore refused as being programs for computers as such.

Full decision O/366/09 329Kb