Wednesday, May 10, 2017 T 1463/11 - Business person versus Skilled person

Is it technical to centralize a function?

The appeal concerns a centralized merchant authentication processing system. The Examining division rejected the application as a "straight-forward implementation of an administrative (outsourced payment) scheme using a notorious distributed information". Initially, also the Board did much like the invention. In the summons, the Board considered the invention to be a "straightforward implementation, on a standard computer network, of non-technical measures (business measures and programming measures)".

Something must have happened after that because the appeal resulted in an order to grant. The reasons provide a detailed discussion of the 'business person' versus the 'skilled person'.