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From: | James Heald |
Subject: | [Fsfe-france] Re: [Patents] Reponse du ministre de l'industrie par rapport aux brevets logiciels |
Date: | Fri, 14 May 2004 10:03:20 -0000 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113 |
Denis, Good response!The glaring hole in the Minister's position is of course the lack of definition of what is technical.
It's interesting that he singles out image processing, signal processing and process control. This is just the tip of the iceberg, though. Ministers across Europe appear to have no conception of just how much the EPO has pushed the idea of "technical" to cover.
One important 'line in the sand' is whether claimed methods on the processing of generic data can ever be technical, ie data not restricted to a particular applicatation by the claims.
Past UK case law maintains that methods which merely address generic data relate to "computer programs as such", and therefore not patentable; thus the current Patent Office manual states:
"1.26.4 The reference in Merrill Lynch to Vicom involving an increase in speed (see 1.26.2) does not mean that an increase in speed of itself is enough. This point was considered in Options Clearing Corpn Inc's Application (unreported) when the hearing officer concluded that Vicom was allowable because it produced an advance, namely an increase in speed, in a technical field, namely the technical field of image
enhancement, and not simply because of the advance itself".But the EPO's notion of technical (at least since the Sohei decision) goes far beyond this, holding that any data processing has "technical character", and so that any new technique of practical usefulness can be a "technical contribution".
This destroys any idea that the word technical is going to limit software patentability.
But you nailed all this very well in your reply.
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