Bionome v Clearwater - intention is not enough

When developing technology that may lead to patentable inventions, it is always a good idea to work out what to do with the resulting intellectual property. The question of who owns the IP is crucial to how and whether the technology can be developed further and commercialised. If the invention results from a joint venture, it is particularly important to figure this out beforehand by specifying in an agreement what each party is bringing to the venture, what they own themselves, and how any resulting IP from the joint venture will be dealt with. Even if such an agreement is reached, however, problems can still arise when the parties fall out before everything is set up commercially. The case of Bionome v Clearwater, which was decided last week at the High Court, is an example of this. 

Image: Grok's idea of a sugar-coated leaf.

The case did not start at the High Court but at the UK IPO, where the claimant Dr Clearwater filed in 2022 a request under sections 8 and 12 for him, or alternatively his company, to be added as joint applicant on Bionome's patent applications. The patent applications at that stage included an international application, published as WO 2021/191614 A1 and a UK application published as GB2598881A. Since then, further applications have been filed from the international application in several other countries. The issue from Dr Clearwater's perspective was that, while the applications had named him as joint inventor, the applicant was identified only as Bionome Holdings Limited, a company that was started by his ex-business partner Dennis McCarthy after they had worked together to develop the invention. 

At issue before the IPO was an agreement between Mr McCarthy (via his son) and Dr Clearwater that stated they agreed to assign their IP to an as-yet unspecified jointly-owned entity after certain steps were concluded. Their working relationship, however, broke down in January 2020 before the entity was created and before any patent applications were filed. It was only after this that Mr McCarthy arranged to file a UK patent application in March 2020, followed by an international application a year later. Before the IPO, Dr Clearwater argued that the agreement was only an intention to assign and not an actual assignment. The hearing officer agreed that it only indicated a direction of travel, did not define future actions and did not constitute a binding agreement regarding ownership of any IP. The hearing officer found in decision BL O/0410/24 in May this year that Dr Clearwater should therefore have been named as joint applicant, not just joint inventor, and ordered his name to be added as joint applicant on the GB and PCT applications. 

Bionome appealed the decision to the High Court, arguing that the hearing officer had got it wrong by misinterpreting section 7 and misconstruing the agreement. They argued that section 7(4), by stating "Except so far as the contrary is established", created a presumption that Bionome had a right to the inventions that could only be overcome by evidence from the claimant. Tom Mitcheson KC, acting as Deputy Judge of the High Court, rejected this argument, finding that the section did not create any sort of additional evidential hurdle or burden beyond the prima facie case that Dr Clearwater had already established, i.e. that he had jointly developed the invention with Mr McCarthy. On the construction of the agreement, Mr Mitcheson found that the hearing officer was correct in interpreting it as amounting only to an intent to transfer any IP and not to an actual assignment of IP. Bionome's appeal was therefore dismissed on both points. 

One lesson to be learned from this case is that agreements expressing only an intention do not amount to an actual assignment. If an actual assignment is intended, this needs to be explicitly expressed and preferably what is being assigned needs to be specified. Another lesson, which may be harder to follow, is not to get into joint ventures with someone who you do not trust, regardless of any agreement. 

Description amendments at the EPO - the beginning of the end?

[This is a lightly edited version of a recent article I wrote for the Barker Brettell website.]

Practice at the EPO currently requires that, before an application is granted, the description must be brought into line with the allowed claims. Doing this can be time-consuming and may involve making difficult choices about what amendments are required and how they should be made. EPO examiners, who are required to follow the Guidelines for Examination, can be strict in applying this requirement, typically allowing no room for ambiguity between what is defined in the claims and what is described in the rest of the application. If, for example, something in the application is described as an "embodiment", current practice will tend to require this to be within the scope of the claims. Otherwise, the description of the embodiment may need to be deleted or mentioned as being not according to the invention. The nature of drafting patent applications, however, means that often there may be some doubt about what is described as an embodiment being within the claims, especially if the claims have been amended to obtain allowance.

There have been strong disagreements about the legal basis for the requirement of conforming the description to the claims. The current Guidelines for Examination states: "Any inconsistency between the description and claims must be avoided if it  could throw doubt on the subject-matter for which protection is sought" (F-IV 4.3). Justification for this is claimed to be from Article 84 EPC, which states that the claims of an application "shall be clear and concise and be supported by the description". Many, however, have questioned whether this requirement for support justifies a requirement for conformity. I have been firmly in the camp of Article 84 providing no justification for amending the description but, having raised this with senior people at the EPO, the prevailing view has been for a long time that "supported by the description" is taken to mean "in conformity with the description". The justification for this always seems to be that the public needs to be kept safe from dangerous Angora cats that manage to squeeze through examination with narrowly interpreted claims, which then suddenly become broader after grant. This is, however, a matter for national courts to decide and should not be for the EPO to determine pre-grant. 

A common feature in patent drafting is to include a section in the description in which a number of claim-like clauses are set out, the intention of which is to provide basis for amendments that might be made later, including after grant. Such clauses are specifically identified for deletion in the Guidelines, based on the reasoning that leaving them in the application would "lead to unclarity [sic] on the subject-matter for which protection is sought" (F-IV 4.4). This specific practice has now been put to the test by an applicant (F. Hoffman-La Roche) who, during examination, objected to deleting a set of claim-like clauses in an otherwise allowable application. The application was then refused for the sole reason that Article 84 EPC was not complied with. The applicant appealed this decision, which has now resulted in a recently published decision T 56/21 on the question of whether such amendments are actually required. 

In their appeal, the applicant argued that the Guidelines were not correct in stating that amendments to the description to conform to the claims were required, indicating that there was no legal basis for this. The Board of Appeal, however, took the view that it was not their job to criticise the Guidelines but instead to consider whether there was any justification for the practice from the law itself. The Board stated:

"The question to be addressed is that of whether Article 84 EPC provides a legal basis for objecting to an inconsistency between what is disclosed as the invention in the description (and/or drawings, if any) and the subject-matter of the claims, the inconsistency being that the description (or any drawing) contains subject-matter which is not claimed, and for requiring removal of this inconsistency by way of amendment of the description (hereinafter: "adaptation of the description"). If so, an application could be refused if the applicant did not amend the description accordingly, or did not agree to an amendment of the description proposed by an examining division" (point 2 of the Reasons for the Decision, emphasis in the original).

The question to be addressed was therefore a broader one than whether claim-like clauses would need to be deleted, and instead related to whether the description should need to be amended at all if there were any inconsistencies with the claims. The Board also referred to Article 69 EPC, which had been used as a further justification for removing any inconsistencies. This provision, which defines the extent of protection of a European patent or application, was considered by the Board to be separate from the assessment of patentability and intended to be used by national courts in infringement proceedings rather than for assessing patentability. The question was therefore limited only to whether Article 84 EPC provided any justification for removing inconsistencies between the description and claims. The purpose of Article 84 EPC, in the Board's view, was to ensure that there was a clear definition of the subject-matter in the claims in terms of technical features of the invention to allow examination for patentability. Claims should be clear from their wording alone, so clarity of the claims of an application should, in the Board's view, be key in examination. If the description were to be used to interpret the meaning of the claims this could, the Board suggested, lead to broad claims being granted based on a narrower interpretation from the description, which would lead to diverging decisions after grant.

On the key question of description amendments, the Board considered that the ordinary meaning of the words of Article 84 EPC ("The claims shall define the matter for which protection is sought. They shall be clear and concise and be supported by the description") did not support a requirement to bring the description into agreement with the claims by deleting or disclaiming subject-matter in the description which is not claimed. Some previous decisions from the Boards of Appeal had decided questions of whether a claimed invention was supported by the description, but these related to whether broad claims should be brought into line with the disclosure by limiting the claims. Other decisions related to bringing the description into conformity with the claims but, in the Board's view, these misconstrued the relationship between Articles 84 and 69 EPC as well as the relationship between the claims and the description. Given that the two provisions should be applied independently in separate situations, with Article 84 before grant and Article 69 after, the Board concluded that there was no rationale for adapting the description to match the subject-matter claims. Matching the description to unclear claims would fail to provide legal certainty, while adapting the description to clear claims would likewise fail to improve legal certainty. The attempts by the EPO and some previous Boards of Appeal may have been aimed at reducing variability in the extent of protection of granted patents, but in the Board's view this encroached on the competence of the national courts and legislators.

In conclusion, the Board decided that Article 84 EPC did not provide a legal basis for a mandatory adaptation of the description to claims of a more limited subject-matter. While the Board had initially envisaged referring a question to the Enlarged Board, in the end they considered that there was no need for this because the requirements of Article 84 EPC for the purpose of examination were unequivocal. The wording left no room for requiring, in examination, that the description be adapted to allowable claims to match their subject-matter. The Board was also not persuaded by the EPO's reasons for requiring the description to be adapted to allowable claims, which were to provide a more uniform determination and better predictability of the extent of protection of granted patents. The Board considered that this could only be achieved if the granted claims were clear in themselves. Adapting the content of the description to match the subject-matter of allowable claims would reduce the reservoir of technical information that could be used in national courts to determine the protection conferred by the granted patent. The Board therefore allowed the appeal and ordered the Examining Division to grant a patent on the basis of the specification with the claim-like clauses intact. The case was remitted to the Examining Division, which has now issued a Rule 71(3) communication with the claim-like clauses intact. 

While the reasoning behind this decision is complex and lengthy, the conclusion is clear: there is no legal basis for requiring applicants to amend the description during examination to match allowed claims. The decision flatly contradicts current practice at the EPO, as defined by the current Guidelines for Examination. What happens next is up to the EPO, unless a further Technical Board decides the issue the other way and finally refers questions to the Enlarged Board. I expect arguments between interested parties and the EPO to continue over at least the next few months, in particular when it comes to the EPO deciding on how the Guidelines are to be amended next year. 

For those wishing to keep a close eye on what happens, I would recommend attending the UNION-IP Winter Roundtable on 28 February 2025, where the issue will be discussed in more detail. 

Some Thoughts on G 1/24

A few months ago I attended an online seminar hosted by the EPO in which the question of interpretation of claim features was discussed. What was interesting about this was the clear difference between how the EPO Boards of Appeal interpret claim features compared to national courts. The difference was about whether the description of a patent should be used to interpret how broad a particular claim feature should be. If the views of an English judge, a Dutch judge and a member of the Enlarged Board of Appeal are anything to go by, the view from the EPO is that a broad claim feature should not be given a narrower interpretation based on what the description states, while national courts will tend to interpret a broad claim feature narrowly based on the description. 

Grok's idea of an Angora cat
(see Jacob LJ's comments here)

This difference in interpretation, while on the face of it perhaps surprising, make some sense when considering that the EPO Boards of Appeal can only determine questions of validity, while national courts determine infringement as well, although this does not fully explain it. If a broadly interpreted claim before the Boards of Appeal is found to be invalid, e.g. for lacking novelty or inventive step, it doesn't make any difference if a particular feature in the description provides a narrow interpretation that could make it valid unless that feature is put in the claim. This is similar to practice before the Examining Division or Opposition Division, where an explanation of what a claim feature means will usually result in that needing to be included in the claim wording. 

If the same claim is put before a national court, the judge will usually be assessing the claim features for infringement as well as for validity, so if the feature is instead interpreted narrowly this may still result in effectively the same outcome, i.e. the claim is only valid if interpreted narrowly as if the narrow interpretation were included in the claim itself. Infringement can then be assessed based on the narrow interpretation, which may result in a claim that is valid but not infringed. The question is whether this difference in interpretation matters. Should interpretation of claims be aligned between the EPO and national courts, or is a difference something that can be allowed to continue given that their roles are different? 

The seminar I mentioned only covered the question of interpretation of broad claim features, but it's also worth considering what would happen if a claim feature is instead interpreted narrowly on the face of the claim language alone but could (or perhaps should) be given a broader interpretation based on the description. The EPO's current way of dealing with this difficulty is to require applicants to ensure that the language of the description is in conformity with that of the claims, using Article 84 EPC as a (possibly flawed) justification for this. This approach is much contested, with applicants often finding it difficult to comply with EPO practice without introducing problematic amendments, which may themselves fall foul of other provisions such as added matter under Article 123(2) EPC. The Boards of Appeal have also disagreed over the past few years on whether such amendments are even required, with the latest contribution in T 56/21 coming down firmly on the side of no amendments being necessary at all. Practice at the EPO has nevertheless been evolving towards a more strict view of making the description be entirely consistent with the claims. The practice itself is, however, not always strictly enforced and there will be many granted patents that contain inconsistencies between what the claims state compared with what is stated in the description. 

The issue of claim interpretation is now one that is sufficiently important for questions to be raised to the Enlarged Board of Appeal, which was done in decision T 439/22. The issue in the decision under appeal relates to whether the term "gathered sheet" in claim 1 of the opposed patent should be interpreted narrowly according to how the skilled person would view it or if it should be given a broader meaning based on what the description stated. The Opposition Division rejected the opposition based on the term having a narrow meaning, while the opponent argued that it should be interpreted more broadly, which would result in it encompassing the prior art. The patent in question therefore stood or fell based on whether the description should be used to impart a broader meaning to an otherwise clear claim feature.

The questions now being raised to the Enlarged Board are the following:

1. Is Article 69(1), second sentence EPC and Article 1 of the Protocol on the Interpretation of Article 69 EPC to be applied to the interpretation of patent claims when assessing the patentability of an invention under Articles 52 to 57 EPC?

2. May the description and figures be consulted when interpreting the claims to assess patentability and, if so, may this be done generally or only if the person skilled in the art finds a claim to be unclear or ambiguous when read in isolation?

3. May a definition or similar information on a term used in the claims which is explicitly given in the description be disregarded when interpreting the claims to assess patentability and, if so, under what conditions?

On question 1, the issue of whether Article 69 EPC should be used by the EPO at all, or if this is just a guide for national courts, may be key to resolving any inconsistency in approach. Since courts across Europe, and now including the UPC, need to be aligned as far as possible with how they interpret granted patents for infringement as well as validity, even though Article 69 EPC is primarily concerned with interpretation for infringement, interpretation for validity at the EPO should ideally be in line with this. In general therefore, the principles in Article 69 may be relevant to patentability, but should not be a primary concern during examination when assessing patentability of an invention under Articles 52 to 57 EPC. As it turns out, T 56/21 has already decided on this specific point and concluded that Article 69 EPC should not be relevant when considering patentability during examination. Instead, Article 84 EPC should be the key requirement during examination, while Article 69 EPC should only be of concern when considering infringement. Following this approach, the answer to question 1 should be a clear no, because Article 84 should instead apply during examination. Personally I would have considered an answer that was more like a yes but with the proviso that Article 69 should not be a primary concern during examination (which appears to be what happens in practice anyway).

Question 2, which does relate to Article 84 rather than Article 69, may be answered by way of a hypothetical example. If, for example, a claim has wording that on the face of it would appear to be clear to the skilled person but the supporting description provides a broadening interpretation by way of a range of examples intended to be covered by the claim wording, it does not seems to me to be correct to take only the narrow wording of the claim and ignore the broader interpretation from the description because this would enable the applicant/proprietor to argue for a narrow interpretation to obtain grant or maintenance of the patent, following which they could argue for a broader interpretation for infringement (known as the 'Angora cat' problem). File wrapper estoppel would not be an appropriate counter to this, because this is not uniformly applied across Europe. The converse, however, should not be a problem because, if a term in a claim is broad and would clearly be understood as such by the skilled person but the description imparts an unambiguously narrower interpretation on the term, granting such a claim would not adversely affect third parties because any infringement issue is for the national (or UPC) courts to decide, i.e. whether such courts interpret the term for infringement broadly or narrowly. The answer to question 2 should therefore be that the description and figures should always be consulted when interpreting features in claims to assess patentability, particularly if these impart a broader scope to any features than would be apparent to the skilled person from the claim wording alone. Article 84 could be used to resolve this, because a narrow claim term that is given a broader meaning in the description could be seen as unclear due to the narrow meaning not being supported, which would require an amendment to be made either to the claims or to the description. 

On question 3, the answer could be found by considering what purpose the definition provides. Article 84 is often used to require that unclear terms in a claim for which there is a clarifying feature in the description need to be amended before grant to make them clear because the general view during examination is that the claim wording needs to be clear by itself. The claim wording may therefore need to be amended during examination to incorporate a definition from the description if it would be unclear otherwise. However, if the claim features are clear in themselves, a definition explicitly given in the description for a particular term used in the claims can only result in a narrower definition of the term so, following from the answer to question 2, can be disregarded for assessing patentability if the term, interpreted more broadly without the definition, is still patentable. If the claims are not patentable without the explicit definition, the definition (or something else) should be incorporated into the claims. The answer should therefore be that such a definition could be disregarded if the claim is clear by itself and still patentable, otherwise the definition may need to be incorporated into the claim. How this is done will depend on whether the situation is for an application undergoing examination, in which case a clarity objection can be raised and an amendment made as a result, or if the situation is for a patent during opposition, in which case clarity cannot be raised on the claims as granted. Instead, during opposition the claims should be interpreted in a way that can make sense to the skilled person and patentability assessed based on that, preferably without imparting a narrow definition from the description because this would again raise the Angora cat problem. If it turns out that the patent is invalid based on this assessment, it will then be up to the patentee to decide what amendments may be needed to make it patentable. 

The above are only a preliminary few thoughts from me on the questions, which could quite reasonably be answered differently. My mind is not yet set on the matter, so it would be interesting to see if anyone has any thoughts to contribute. 

J 1/24: Can an application be pending after grant?

Do I actually need to be here?

According to Rule 36 EPC, a divisional application may be filed relating to any pending earlier European patent application. This used to mean that a divisional could only be filed until just before an earlier application was granted, refused or finally deemed withdrawn. There was a long running argument in the early 2000s about the effect of filing an appeal if an application was refused, which would usually happen at the end of oral proceedings before the Examining Division. Since some applicants wanted to make sure they didn't lose the opportunity to have another go, it used to be common to file a divisional application just before oral proceedings in case the application was refused because, once the application was refused, it would then no longer be pending. An alternative would be to file an appeal against the decision to refuse, which would have the effect of suspending the refusal while the appeal was pending. Preparing and filing an appeal just to get a divisional filed was, however, an expensive way to go about it.

The question then was whether it was actually necessary to file an appeal, or if a notice of appeal and then grounds of appeal would need to be filed for any divisional filed after the date of refusal to be valid. This resulted in conflicting decisions, with the Board in J 28/03 finding that the suspensive effect of an appeal depended on the outcome of the appeal, meaning that the status of a divisional could remain uncertain for years. This was finally resolved by a referral being made to the Enlarged Board in J 2/08, which asked whether a refused application could be considered pending within the meaning of Rule 36(1) EPC until expiry of the time for filing a notice of appeal, even if no appeal was actually filed. The Enlarged Board decided in G 1/09 that the answer to this was yes. Nervous applicants could thereafter go to Examining Division oral proceedings without fearing that their opportunity to file a divisional would be lost in the event the application got refused. 

So much for applications that were refused, but what about applications that are granted? A decision to grant a patent is issued by the EPO once the grant procedure is completed, i.e. claims translations are filed, renewals are up to date and the grant fee and any excess claims fees are paid. The decision states a future date on which the application will be granted and, as from that date, the application is no longer pending. The current understanding is that any divisional has to be filed at the latest by the day before the date of grant. But what happens if the applicant files a notice of appeal against the decision to grant? Is this even a valid thing to do, and if so does this suspend the effect of the decision to grant, allowing more time for a divisional application to be filed? 

Implausible though it appears, this actually happened in the case of European application 19209269.0, for which a decision to grant issued on 18 February 2021, indicating that the application would be granted on 17 March 2021. The applicant filed a notice of appeal on 16 April 2021, requesting that the decision to grant be set aside, which was followed by grounds of appeal filed on 18 June 2021, arguing that, due to a change in practice by the EPO regarding Article 84, the applicant was adversely affected by amendments made to the description before grant. In the interim, however, the EPO issued a communication indicating that the original decision to grant maintained its effect and remained valid, but (rather confusingly) that the date of publication of the mention of grant on 17 March 2021 would be deleted. The applicant had by then filed a divisional application which, if the original date of grant was maintained, would have been invalidly filed. 

The situation then developed further when, on 7 April 2022, the applicant withdrew its appeal and, on 18 May 2022, the EPO Receiving Section issued a notice of loss of rights on the divisional application, stating that it could not be proceeded with, referring to the decision of J 28/03 (see above).  The applicant then requested a decision, arguing that the application had been validly filed as a divisional. The decision, which was based on the reasoning from J 28/03, stated that the divisional had not been validly filed because the parent had already been granted and every further action was dependent on the outcome of the appeal proceedings. The suspensive effect of the appeal only interrupted the procedure until the appeal was withdrawn. The applicant then appealed this decision, which has now led to issuance of the Legal Board of Appeal decision in J 1/24. 

The question for the Board in this case was whether the parent application was still pending according to Rule 36 EPC when the divisional application was filed. Although there was no definition in the EPC about what constituted a pending application, it was established that decisions of the EPO "do not become final until expiry of the period for seeking ordinary means of legal redress" (reasons, point 7). This was decided in G 1/09 in relation to the period for filing a divisional application during the period for filing a notice of appeal following refusal of an application, although the Enlarged Board also indicated (in obiter comments) that the pending status of an application ceased on the day before mention of its grant was published. In this case, the Board found the principle in J 28/03 that the status of the parent application depended on the outcome of the appeal unconvincing, and instead found that an appeal did have suspensive effect regardless of whether this was against refusal or grant. This was supported by the reasoning in G 1/09 that an application that has been refused is still pending for the purpose of Rule 36 EPC during the period for filing a notice of appeal. The same conclusion should therefore apply to a decision to grant. Given that the date of grant was in this case deleted after the notice of appeal was filed, the parent application was still pending when the divisional application was filed, meaning that the divisional was validly filed regardless of the eventual outcome of the appeal. 

This new decision does not appear to fully resolve the issue of whether a divisional application can be filed after the date of grant in the same way as G 1/09 because it seems to rely on the date of grant being deleted as a result of a notice of appeal being filed. Therefore, unlike in the case of a decision to refuse an application, it appears that a notice of appeal still has to be filed for the application to be pending when a divisional is filed. It does, however, appear to give applicants a new possibility in the rare event of an applicant changing their mind on whether to file a divisional after it has already become too late. Will it be used in practice? I suspect rarely, but it's one to keep in the back pocket for those rare occasions when something does not go as planned. 

Emotional Perception at the Court of Appeal

I wrote a few months ago about the, in my view, deeply flawed judgment from the High Court in the case of Emotional Perception AI Ltd, which was an appeal from a UK IPO hearing officer decision that refused the application in question for being excluded under Section 1(2) as a program for a computer. There were a few things that were, in my view, wrong about the judgment but the main one was the finding by the judge that an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) was not a computer program. The reasoning by the judge was along the lines of computer programs needing to be written by a human to count as being computer programs, while ANNs were instead generated by training. My opinion at the time on the judge's reasoning was this:

"Although it should not be necessary to point out to anyone reading this with any knowledge of computers at all, the single major flaw in the reasoning of this judgment is that the ANN, whether in hardware or software, would in actual fact be defined by software in the form of computer code defining connections and weights of the ANN and how it operates. It should go without saying that computer software does not need to be written by a human being for it to be a computer program. Indeed, all computer software in the form it is ultimately used, i.e. object code, is not human readable at all but is a string of 1s and 0s that is only readable by a computer. It is still, however, a program for a computer within the meaning of section 1(2) or of Article 52(2) EPC. How the computer program is generated, whether this is by compilation of human-written source code or the result of a training process (or, in this case, a combination of both), is not relevant to whether it is considered a program for a computer. It is also not relevant, according at least to Gale's Application, whether the program is implemented on hardware instead of software. Both are defined by code that defines how hardware operates, either by programming a general purpose piece of hardware or by defining a specific arrangement created or burned into circuit form in hardware".

The IPO appealed the High Court decision on four grounds, the first two of which related to whether the "program for a computer" exclusion was engaged in the case of ANNs. The other two related to whether the mathematical method exclusion applied and whether there was a substantive technical contribution.

At the Court of Appeal, Lord Justice Colin Birss took the lead judgment, with Lord Justice Richard Arnold and Lady Justice Nicola Davies following. Readers will recall that Colin Birss has been involved in cases like this going right back to the Aerotel judgment in 2006, where he was the barrister representing the Comptroller in their appeal. There could not therefore be a more suitably qualified appeal judge for this case. 

Much of the judgment goes into describing the technical detail and background to the claimed invention, which I don't need to go into here. The key part is where the first two grounds of appeal are discussed (paragraph 56 onwards). A few dictionary definitions were referred to regarding what a computer program is, which Birss LJ decided came down to a computer program being "a set of instructions for a computer to do something" (para 61). Importantly, this was consistent with the Aerotel judgment, which referred to a computer program being simply "a set of instructions". 

The applicant's argument attempted to push the idea that a computer program required the involvement of a human computer programmer, but Birss LJ found that was neither relevant nor helpful. Code written by a human would be in the form of a high level programming language, but computers actually worked by running machine code that was generally not human readable. There was no justification for a distinction between code written by a human and code created by a computer. Since an ANN was a computer, whether implemented in hardware or software, the inputs used to define it (such as the connections and weights of the network) amounted to a computer program. It followed that the computer program exclusion was engaged, contrary to what the High Court judge decided. 

Birss LJ also found that the High Court judge erred in finding that the output of the claimed invention, which was in the form of a recommended file (e.g. a music file selection based on a matching process done by the ANN) involved a technical contribution. This was found to be nothing more than the standard transmission of a file representing a recommendation, which the IPO hearing officer found at first instance had no technical effect. Instead, any effect was only in terms of the semantic meaning of the file selected. None of the AT&T signposts were of assistance with this. 

In conclusion, the appeal was allowed and the hearing officer's decision to find the invention excluded from patentability was upheld. We are now back to where we were before, with some clarification now that ANNs are computers and the way they are configured is by way of computer programs*. 

*Edited - see comments below.

Conquest Planning: Estoppel & res judicata

There has been some excitement over the past few months among the very niche community of UK patent attorneys specialising in AI, following the High Court judgment of Emotional Perception. I wrote about the case here and it was also written about in a slightly more approving way by one of my work colleagues. It was inevitable while the judgment still stood (an appeal is currently pending with a hearing at the Court of Appeal scheduled for May 2024) that attempts would be made to get applications relating to AI through the UK IPO that would previously have been considered unpatentable, particularly given the change in practice in light of the judgment. At least one such attempt has been made, which has resulted in the decision last month in the case of Conquest Planning Inc. (BL O/0259/24). 

The application, GB2311361.6, was a divisional of an earlier UK application that was a national phase entry of PCT application PCT/CA2020/050275. The abstract on the cover page of the published PCT application is probably enough for the reader to have a good guess as to where this, originally Canadian, application was going to go in Europe. This described the invention as "a financial planning system that comprises a Strategic Advice Manager (SAM) module that utilizes an artificial intelligence (AI) module to automate and optimize the financial planning decision-making process". Unsurprisingly, in decision BL O/988/23 from 24 October 2023, the application was refused because the hearing officer found the claimed invention to be a tool for recommending financial plans in which an AI module was used. This related entirely to an administrative process that was computer-implemented but made no improvements to a computer in a technical sense. This resulted in the invention being found to be excluded under section 1(2) for being a method for doing business and a program for a computer as such. The fact that the invention made use of a computer program did not impart any technical contribution, following the usual reasoning from Aerotel/Macrossan and AT&T/CVON. 

Probably expecting this negative result, the applicant had already arranged for a divisional to be filed in July 2023. This application then faced similar objections from the examiner and eventually (although rather more quickly this time, due to the compliance period coming up) came before a hearing officer after the examiner decided that the claims on file as of 8 December 2023 were not patentable for essentially the same reasons as were already provided in the earlier decision. By that time, however, the Emotional Perception judgment had come out, so the applicant ran the argument before the hearing officer that, because the application related to AI, the change in practice should be taken into account. A question then was whether the applicant was trying to have a second go at getting the same invention patented. The issue to be considered was what bearing the previous decision had on the divisional application. The hearing officer noted that, in a previous decision BL O/033/09 (Rajesh Kapur), the principle of estoppel was found to apply to ensure that litigation was final and could not be subsequently fought all over again. The Patents Hearing Manual notes at points 1.96 and 1.97:

"Estoppel by record (doctrine of res judicata) applies where a relevant judgment (and that includes a decision of a tribunal such as the comptroller) has already been given. The judgment stands forever, as between the parties unless it is modified by the normal course of appeal (in which case the modified judgment stands in its place). For example, in an infringement action (Poulton v Adjustable Cover & Boiler Block co (1908) 25 RPC 529 the plaintiff was awarded damages which were ordered to be assessed and paid by the defendant in due course. However, before the damages had been paid, the defendant caused the patent to be revoked on the basis of new evidence. Accordingly, he argued that he need no longer pay the original damages since the patent must, at the time of the first action, have been invalid. He was however held to the terms of the first decision. This judgment although old remains good law - see Coflexip SA v Stolt Offshore MS Ltd (No 2) [2004] EWCA Civ 213, [2004] FSR 34, discussed below with regard to abuse of legal process. See also Unilin Beheer BV v Berry Floor NV and Others [2007] EWCA Civ 364 in which it was decided that a later finding of invalidity of an EP(UK) patent in an EPO opposition would not disturb a finding in the UK Courts that the patent was valid and infringed as between the parties in the UK action, so that any damages must still be paid.

There are two types of estoppel by record. The first is "cause of action" estoppel where the same cause of action lies in a final judgment (cf the example given above). The second is issue estoppel which, per Lord Denning in Fidelitas Shipping Co Ltd's v vlo Exportchleb [1966] 1 QB 630 at p640, applies where, within one cause of action, there are several issues raised which are necessary for the determination of the whole case. Once an issue has been raised and distinctly determined (even if the question was in fact not the subject of any dispute or argument) then as a general rule neither party can be allowed to fight that issue all over again. But not always - cf, for example, Rose Bro's (Gainsborough) Ltds Appln [1960] RPC 247 and Hodgkinson & Corby Ltd & anr v Wards Mobility Services Ltd [1997] FSR 178. Cinpres Gas Injection Limited v Melea Limited [2008] EWCA Civ 9 contains a discussion of the difference between cause of action and issue estoppel - see paragraphs 66 to 77. Estoppel was not established in that case, the judgment holding that there had been perjury by a witness closely identified with one of the parties; (see paragraphs 105 to 107), and adoption of the fraud by the party itself; (paragraphs 108 - 120)."

As a result, the hearing officer found that the applicant was prevented from asserting that the claimed invention was outside of the exclusions from patentability if the scope of those exclusions remained unchanged. Did the Emotional Perception judgment change the scope of the exclusions though? The judge had found that a system for recommending data files using an artificial neural network (ANN) was not excluded as a computer program. The claimed invention in this case involved the step of training an artificial intelligence to develop a financial plan, which the applicant argued was sufficient to determine the question of patentability in their favour. The hearing officer, however, found that this did not relate to a trained ANN or to the training of a ANN but instead to a generic AI. It could not therefore be said to engage the exclusions raised in Emotional Perception. Given the identical facts and identical law, the previous decision must be followed. The application was therefore refused. 

The lesson here then is that, although there may have been a change in practice in light of Emotional Perception, the effect while the judgment stands is likely to be very limited, being specific to the question of whether an ANN can be considered to be a computer program as such. If the claimed invention does not relate specifically to an ANN, the change in practice is not going to be of much use. Another point to note is that the other exclusions, in particular that relating to business methods, will still apply, so even if the computer program exclusion is avoided there may be others that can still prevent a patent being granted. 

If you like this ...

I was hoping that someone else would by now have critically analysed the recent High Court judgment in Emotional Perception AI Ltd [2023] EWHC 2948 (Ch), which issued on 21 November 2023, but it appears that nobody has yet. There has been a recent article in the CIPA Journal, but the less said about that the better. Even the IPKat has said nothing about it so far, which is a pity. It appears therefore to fall to me to do the necessary explanation and (to give the game away somewhat) point out that the judgment is a definite outlier and is not in line with higher level case law, including several judgments from the Court of Appeal, nor is it in line with case law at the EPO. There have been several articles published that have, rather excitedly, announced the judgment as some kind of breakthrough for AI inventions because it finds, in effect, that a trained artificial neural network (ANN) is not a program for a computer under section 1(2) of the Patents Act 1977. This is, of course, in reality complete nonsense. As a consequence, the reasoning goes, this will result in AI inventions now being much more patentable than they were before. The UK IPO have even changed their practice to instruct their examiners that, as from 29 November 2023, objections should not even be raised to inventions involving an ANN for excluded subject matter. This is great news for inventors working in the field of AI who want patent protection (which may not be all of them), and also great news for their patent attorneys. I, however, am not so sure it will work out well in the longer run, and suspect this will be a temporary aberration, although I may of course be wrong.

I have been following case law on patentability in the UK and at the EPO for the past 17 years or so, coincidentally starting roughly around the time of the Court of Appeal judgment in Aerotel/Macrossan [2006] EWCA Civ 1371, which issued while I was sitting my UK Finals in 2006. Looking at my IPKat posts from around that time (see here for example), there was much discussion in the follow-up to Aerotel about whether the 4-step test was actually in line with the EPO, which instead applied the problem-solution approach according to Comvik (T 641/00). After a bit of disagreement about the validity of computer program claims (see here), the issues in the UK appeared to settle. Although the tests applied at the UK IPO and the EPO are very different, the core issues are essentially the same, which is whether there is a 'technical effect' (which I wrote about in 2013 here). I have revisited this several times in the intervening years, most recently when writing a chapter for the IPKat's 20th anniversary book. Although there has been some tinkering around the edges, the general principles have not really changed for at least 10 years and, for better or worse, have been applied with reasonable consistency by the UK IPO. These principles can be found in any of the numerous decisions that have come from UK IPO hearing officers, which I have had the dubious pleasure of reviewing for the CIPA journal for the past 17 years. You may even have read one or two of my reviews, although I suspect very few people do.

Firstly, according to Aerotel/Macrossan, the way to deal with 'excluded matter' under section 1(2) (i.e. things that are not inventions for the purposes of the Act), was to: 

i) properly construe the claim; 

ii) identify the contribution (which may be the actual or alleged contribution, depending on whether a search has been performed); 

iii) ask whether the contribution falls solely within excluded matter; and 

iv) if step iii) hasn't already covered it, check whether the contribution is actually technical. 

Secondly, in considering whether a computer program makes a technical contribution, the later decision in AT&T/CVON, which was supported and slightly amended by the Court of Appeal judgment in HTC v Apple [2013] EWCA Civ 451, set out the following five 'signposts', any one of which may indicate the presence of a technical contribution according to step iv) of the Aerotel test:

i. Whether the claimed technical effect has a technical effect on a process which is carried on outside the computer. 

ii. Whether the claimed technical effect operates at the level of the architecture of the computer; that is to say whether the effect is produced irrespective of the data being processed or the applications being run. 

iii. Whether the claimed technical effect results in the computer being made to operate in a new way. 

iv. Whether the program makes the computer a better computer in the sense of running more efficiently and effectively as a computer. 

v. Whether the perceived problem is overcome by the claimed invention as opposed to merely being circumvented.

It is worth noting at this point that, although Kitchin LJ stated, "these are useful signposts [...] But that does not mean to say they will be determinative in every case", in practice at the UK IPO, rightly or wrongly, these signposts have been determinative in every case where they have been applied. There has not been a single case where the signposts have been used and yet the invention has still been found to have a technical contribution. I would certainly have noticed and pointed it out with great excitement if there had been. To at least a first approximation therefore, if the contribution in a computer-implemented invention is not found to be within at least one of the signposts, it is not patentable.

With that all established, a computer-implemented method in a patent application such as the one put forward by Emotional Perception AI Limited (previously known as Mashtraxx Limited), would be expected to face a difficult time in getting granted. The application itself related to a method of training and implementing an ANN to identify a pair of similar data files, a particular example being music files. In simple terms, the claimed invention was about matching data files based on closeness of written descriptions and of the data itself. The actual claimed invention is a classic example of technical obfuscation, with the latest version of claim 1 reading as follows:

The IPO examiner objected that the claimed invention was not patentable because it related to a mathematical method and a computer program as such, objecting that the contribution made by the claimed invention (leaving aside clarity and sufficiency issues with claim 1) was to software for training an ANN to identify similar files by extracting measurable signal qualities from two files, assembling a multidimensional feature vector for each file based on these qualities, determining the distance between the two vectors and adjusting the ANN's weights to provide a measure of similarity between the files. In effect, the invention (in my words, not the examiner's) was about analysing music files to provide an output of the type "if you like this, then you might also like this". The examiner found that this did not solve a technical problem, and especially not a technical problem within a computer. The invention was computer-implemented, but used conventional hardware that was programmed to perform a non-technical function. It was not directed to a process outside of the computer, nor did it form part of the internal workings of the computer. In conclusion, the examiner found that the invention was "directed to an excluded process and there is nothing more to it" (examination report 13/10/21, page 10/11). 

After reaching this impasse with the examiner, the applicant then went for a hearing before the (very experienced) hearing officer Phil Thorpe. Among the arguments run by the applicant, one involved a comparison with the seminal EPO Board of Appeal decision from 1986 of Vicom (T 208/84), which decided that an image processing algorithm could be technical because the output was an improved image, which was considered to be technical. The hearing officer did not, however, consider that the comparison was a good one, because in this case there was no change to the data files, but only an output that provided an indication of a pair of semantically similar files. The claimed invention, in the hearing officer's view, did not therefore define a technical process and the contribution was found to relate wholly to a computer program as such, resulting in the application being refused. 

At that point, I would expect any normal applicant to give up and take the loss, given the very low hit rate of getting computer-implemented inventions facing excluded matter objections granted at the UK IPO. In this case, however, the applicant and their attorney did not give up and instead took the matter to appeal before Sir Anthony Mann in the High Court. Although obviously a highly experienced legal mind, Sir Anthony has not come to my attention at all previously in the area of patent cases, let alone the highly specialised area of patentability of computer-implemented inventions. As it turns out, this is I think one of the key problems with the judgment. 

Sir Anthony first set out how he understood the invention, which he considered could be envisaged as a 'black box' "which is capable of being trained as how to process an input, learning by that training process, holding that learning within itself and then processing that input in a way derived from that training and learning" (paragraph 3). He then described the claimed invention as being an improved system for providing media file recommendations to an end user, particularly for music files, the advantage of which was to offer suggestions of similar music in terms of human perception and emotion by passing music through a trained ANN. Claim 1, which had been (rather confusingly) amended from the above claim 1 to a "system for providing semantically relevant file recommendations" was defined by Sir Anthony as "a product by process claim", while another independent claim defined a corresponding method, both defining the steps of training the ANN and providing an output of relevant files. My initial problem at this point is that claim 1 as presented in the judgment (see here) is not really a product by process claim, but is a system defined by its features of operation, which is not in line with how a typical product by process claim is defined (see for example the EPO Guidelines F-IV 4.12). 

My next problem with the judgment is Sir Anthony then going on to "assume for the moment that the ANN itself is a hardware system (as opposed to a software emulation)" (paragraph 8). Why this assumption is made is completely beyond me. There is no justification for it from the application, nor is there any sensible reason why the ANN would be assumed to be hardware. In the Court of Appeal judgment of Gale's Application [1991] RPC 305, which is supposed to be in line with the current Aerotel test, Aldous LJ found that putting instructions on hardware did not make an invention patentable. The invention in that case related to a new way of calculating a square root on a computer. Aldous LJ found that "if Mr. Gale's discovery or method or program were embodied in a floppy disc (software) neither the disc nor a computer into whose RAM that programs had been inserted could be patented, it must, in my view, follows that the silicon chip with its circuitry embodying the program (hardware) cannot be patented either" (para 332). Simply switching from software to hardware did not therefore, based on this reasoning, make an invention patentable if it did the same thing. Sir Anthony, however (who did not appear to be aware of this judgment as he made no reference to it, nor was it pointed out to him by the UK IPO) managed to change the argument about whether the invention in this case was patentable by arbitrarily assuming that the ANN was implemented on hardware and entirely ignoring the valid line of reasoning that this should make no difference. 

The next problem I have with the judgment is another apparent misunderstanding by Sir Anthony, apparently led by the applicant's representatives, where he came to the view that the ANN training model was not programmed to include all its detailed logical steps but adjusted itself through training to produce a model which satisfied the training objective. This led him to ask the question of where the computer program was that was said to engage the exclusion. This resulted in a confused bit of reasoning about where the program would be in the case of a hardware ANN (which had already been wrongly assumed), with the UK IPO's representative implausibly conceding that "there would in that case be no program to which the exclusion applies" (para 43). This inevitably resulted in Sir Anthony, having been well and truly led up the garden path by the applicant's attorney and the IPO's problematic representation, that there was in fact no computer program because the ANN was not operating on a set of program instructions at all but "was emulating a piece of hardware which had physical nodes and layers, and was no more operating or applying a program than a hardware system was". It becomes very difficult at this point to take the judgment seriously any more because the reasoning is so preposterous and wrong that anything further is bound to be wrong. And so it turned out to be, with Sir Anthony concluding that the ANN in substance operated at a different level from the underlying software on the computer and operated in the same way as a hardware ANN, resulting in the emulated ANN not being a program for a computer and therefore not excluded. 

Although it should not be necessary to point out to anyone reading this with any knowledge of computers at all, the single major flaw in the reasoning of this judgment is that the ANN, whether in hardware or software, would in actual fact be defined by software in the form of computer code defining connections and weights of the ANN and how it operates. It should go without saying that computer software does not need to be written by a human being for it to be a computer program. Indeed, all computer software in the form it is ultimately used, i.e. object code, is not human readable at all but is a string of 1s and 0s that is only readable by a computer. It is still, however, a program for a computer within the meaning of section 1(2) or of Article 52(2) EPC. How the computer program is generated, whether this is by compilation of human-written source code or the result of a training process (or, in this case, a combination of both), is not relevant to whether it is considered a program for a computer. It is also not relevant, according at least to Gale's Application, whether the program is implemented on hardware instead of software. Both are defined by code that defines how hardware operates, either by programming a general purpose piece of hardware or by defining a specific arrangement created or burned into circuit form in hardware.

As if the judgment wasn't wrong enough at that point, Sir Anthony then went on to decide whether there would be a technical effect to the invention, having nevertheless already decided that it wasn't excluded. After going through some of the usual case law on the subject, including the somewhat dubious decision in Protecting Kids, Sir Anthony went on to agree with the applicant that "moving data outside the computer system in the form of the file that is transferred [...] provides an external (outside world) effect". This is, of course, entirely out of line with all existing case law on the subject, both in the UK and at the EPO. Sir Anthony nevertheless went on to find that there was a technical effect in providing an (entirely unchanged) file selection to a user as an output of the claimed invention, and allowed the appeal. 

At this point, the only comment I have to add is the following: