High Court rules against UKIPO in patent case
20th March 2008
The High Court has overturned a decision by the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) which rejected a patent application as being nothing more than software. The UKIPO have responded to the ruling saying that it will appeal as the ruling is incompatible with other decisions.
The intellectual property rights surrounding software are controversial however, the patentability of software appeared to be settled in a decision by the Court of Appeal in 2006, which (after considering the cases of Aerotel and Neal Macrossan) oulined exactly how a court should decide whether the invention is patentable or when it consists purely of software (which is not patentable).
In this new ruling, the High Court said the UK-IPO was wrong to reject a patent application for an invention by Symbian.
In response, the UKIPO stated that the judge did not apply the guidelines outlined during the previous Court of Appeal cases and that it will appeal and in a statement said "The UK-IPO believes that when deciding whether this computer implemented invention is patentable, Mr Justice Patten did not apply the so-called 'Aerotel/Macrossan test', which was established by the Court of Appeal in the way intended. This, in UKIPO's view, has created uncertainty about how the Aerotel/Macrossan test should be applied for inventions of this type."
Symbian makes operating systems for mobile devices and the invention in this case related to the indexing of library functions to ensure operating system stability. It was awarded a patent by the European Patent Office (EPO) which has different rules on software patents.
For more information on this case, visit the UKIPO or Out-Law.com The For the full ruling can be found at Symbian case