Tuesday, July 21, 2015 T 306/10 - Recommender systems not patentable

Can an improved recommender system be inventive? Claim 1 of the main request concerned a 'method of discovering relationships between items'. In response to a query item, user logs are found in which the query occurs. Based on the logs a result item is then identified. 

One problem with such recommenders is that best sellers tend to occur in many user logs. Thus, such an algorithm would tend to recommend best sellers in response to any query. The invention in this application solved this problem by identifying an item which is over-represented compared to all user logs. An auxiliary request also outputs the identified result item as a recommendation.

However, the board will have none of it. Improvement in the selection of an item for recommendation is regarded as subjective, and thus not technical, and thus not patentable. A lot of non-trivial research is done on recommender systems, however; much of it involving mathematics (see this example). Following this decision, none of it can be protected.

The decision uses the notorious general-purpose computer as closest prior art. Some other boards seem to dislike this and have held that notorious should be interpreted narrowly (T698/11; T690/06; T359/11). In this regard it would be interesting if the amendments suggested in an obiter dictum (R.4.8) were carried out, to see if that could at least have swayed the board to adopt a more realistic starting point for inventive step.