Friday, October 14, 2016 T 497/11: Revert an amendment after 9 years

In this opposition appeal admissibility is initially an important subject of the discussion. About one month before the oral proceedings (2016) the Appellants filed amended claims which would, according to the Board, "effectively revert to the method claims they had filed in 2007". The amendment comprises the deletion of "by using a computer".
When reading also the inventive step discussion of one of the requests, it seems that the Appellants would like to delete this features from the claims to enforce the choice of the closest prior art into another direction. The selected closest prior art was generic prior art in the field of air traffic control: "A system including a processor, memory, display and input device, for an aviation system, the system further comprising means (e.g. radio) for communicating to said aircraft."
If this amendment is accepted, the board had to start a discussion of the technicality of the claims. One of the arguments of the Appellants was that the recently filed claims were filed because the representation of the Appellants changed. Is that argument enough to get the amendments into the procedure?

This decision is also interesting because a number of features of auxiliary requests are considered to be a mere automation of mental acts, for example, performed by a flight controller. Thus, although the claims are technical with the feature of "by using a computer", most features do not contribute to the inventiveness of the claims because they are not technical.

Tuesday, June 21, 2016 T 690/11 - When is presenting information technical?

Set-up procedure screen without web-browser

This opposition appeal concerns a dialysis system that shows set-up procedure screens to help an operator.

Claim 1 of the patent as granted reads as follows:

"A dialysis system (10,100) comprising:
a display device (40); and
a web browser (602) and web server(604) embedded in the dialysis system, characterized in that the browser and the server operate with the display device to:
display a plurality of dialysis therapy set-up procedure screens that require an operator input, and
display a plurality of dialysis treatment screens that graphically illustrate the progress of at least one step in the dialysis therapy in at least substantially real time."

The opponent considers that the features of displaying dialysis therapy set-up procedure screens and treatment screens are non-technical and should be disregarded for inventive step. The board disagrees, and finds this claim inventive over a dialysis system with a web browser. The comparable case T 336/14, which featured earlier on this blog, went the other way; the present claim is distinguished from it in the decision below.

Tuesday, April 26, 2016 T 651/12 - To display information in an ergonomically improved manner is a technical purpose

The Examining Division considered the subject-matter of claim 1 according to the main request to lack an inventive step and refused an application. The Examining Division reasoned that the claim was made up of technical and non-technical features, the technical features merely defining a commonplace map display apparatus and the non-technical features defining a method defining an abstract calculation on the basis of modelled map data. The applicant appealed, arguing that the claim features were technical as was the problem solved.
According to the Board's opinion, a map display apparatus and method explicitly comprising, after the calculation of the three-dimensional bird's eye view map, displaying this map on the screen, would provide a more realistic view of the road to the user and support the user in better orienting himself. This would be considered to be a technical solution to a technical problem: the outcome of the calculation is used for a technical purpose, namely to display information in an ergonomically improved manner (r.3.2). Also the calculation as such has in the board's judgement clear technical aspects (r 3.3).

Friday, December 04, 2015 T 886/10: A system for implementing an entirely new business model

The Examining division refused the patent application because "the distinguishing features per se relate to business considerations". The Appellant did not agree with the Examining Division and filed an appeal. Appellant argued that the system is based on non-obvious technical considerations. 
The decision of the Board of Appeal is relative short. Often decisions are short because the Appellant was not very active in appeal procedure. In this case the Appellant tried to safe his case with submitting some arguments and filing an auxiliary request. However, it seems that the original application did not contain enough technical information to get a claim with inventive features that are not excluded under Art. 52(2)(c) EPC.