A decision from the Court of Appeal in the UK last week (19th July 2024) has clarified the law in relation to whether artificial neural networks (ANN) may be patented. The UK IPO had originally refused a patent application relating to how an ANN was used to recommend music media files on the grounds that the ANN invention did not involve a technical contribution.
This refusal was then appealed by the applicant, Emotional Perception AI Limited, to the UK High Court. In a decision last year, the UK High Court issued a surprising judgement that ANNs are patentable resulting in a significant change in practice at the UK IPO. This judgment and the resulting practice change at the UK IPO was in major contrast to the settled practice of examining computer-implemented inventions at the European Patent Office.
The UK Court of Appeal has now overturned the High Court judgment and upheld the original refusal by the UK IPO. The ANN invention was held to be a computer program per se and did not provide any technical contribution to the art. This is a welcome clarification of the law in the UK in relation to what types of machine learning models may be protected with patents.
Patent protection is available for software and computer-implemented inventions in Europe. To be successful at the EPO or the UK IPO, it is vital to identify the technical features of the invention and explain how the computer innovation is achieving a technical effect to address a technical problem.
Read the full judgment here: Comptroller - General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks v Emotional Perception AI Limited - Find case law - The National Archives