''Fujitsu's Application''

997 Year 997 (Roman numerals, CMXCVII) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Japan * 1 February: Empress Teishi gives birth to Princess Shushi - she is the first ...

EWCA Civ 1174 is a 6 March 1997 judgment by the

Court of Appeal of England and Wales The Court of Appeal (formally "His Majesty's Court of Appeal in England", commonly cited as "CA", "EWCA" or "CoA") is the highest court within the Courts of England and Wales#Senior Courts of England and Wales, Senior Courts of England and Wal ...

. The judges' decision was to confirm the refusal of a patent by the

United Kingdom Patent Office The Intellectual Property Office of the United Kingdom (often referred to as the UK IPO) is, since 2 April 2007, the operating name of The Patent Office. It is the official government body responsible for intellectual property rights in the UK ...

and by Mr Justice Laddie in the High Court. Lord Justice Aldous heard the appeal before the Court of Appeal.

Facts

Fujitsu is a Japanese multinational information and communications technology equipment and services corporation, established in 1935 and headquartered in Tokyo. Fujitsu is the world's sixth-largest IT services provider by annual revenue, and the la ...

's claimed invention was a new tool for modelling crystal structures on a computer. A scientist wishing to investigate what would result if he made a new material consisting of a combination of two existing compounds would enter data representing those compounds and how they should be joined into the computer. The computer then automatically generated and displayed the new structure using the data supplied. Previously, the same effect could only have been achieved by assembling plastic models by hand - a time-consuming task.

Discussion

* UK courts should look to the decisions of the European Patent Office for guidance in interpreting the exclusions. * A "technical contribution" is needed to make a potentially excluded thing patentable, proclaiming that this was a concept at the heart of

patent law A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A p ...

and referring to the European Patent Office's decision i
T 208/84, VICOM
* There is a difficulty inherent in determining what is and is not "technical", such that each case should be decided on its own facts. * The substance of an invention should be used to assess whether or not a thing is patentable, not the form in which it is claimed. Thus a non-patentable method cannot be patented under the guise of an apparatus.

Judgment

The claimed invention was certainly a useful tool. However, as claimed, the invention was nothing more than a conventional computer which automatically displayed a crystal structure shown pictorially in a form that would in the past have been produced as a model. The only advance expressed in the claims was the computer program which enabled the combined structure to be portrayed more quickly. The new tool therefore provided nothing that went beyond the normal advantages that are obtained by the use of a computer program. Thus, there was no technical contribution and the application was rejected as being a computer program as such.

References

External links

Software Patents After Fujitsu. New Directions or (another) Missed Opportunity?

Is the extension of the patent system to include software related inventions desirable?

A STEP FORWARD: EXCLUDING 'TECHNICAL' FROM THE TEST FOR PATENTABLE SUBJECT MATTER

Inherent Patentability as related to computer software
written after High Court judgment but before Court of Appeal had issued their judgment
Sviluppo Web ed eCommerce

Digital Marketing ed eCommerce
{{Fujitsu Software patent case law United Kingdom patent case law Court of Appeal (England and Wales) cases 1997 in case law 1997 in British law Fujitsu

Facts

Discussion

Judgment

See also

References

External links