On Tue, Dec 10, 2002 at 08:06:09AM +0100, Xavi Drudis Ferran wrote:
There is also the 17th senate that does not agree in that software is patentable, I believe. I've heard there are cases in one sense and another. But possibly we should come down to too much detail to find out.
Can you please tell me what the 17th senate is? I was at an EPO conference a few weeks ago, and a member of the German patent office presented to us the German case law. From this I got the impression the general view in Germany is what the BGH said.
I need to find references. I think it is called BGH17 in German, but I don't speak German. Sorry. There is also an interesting case in Poland, I think, though Poland is not yet in the EU (nor the EPC, I think).
It's probably the PatG/17. The PatG/21 is responsible for electronics and is more pro-software patents (and by being cleverm, they get a lot of software related cases to the PatG/21 to push them through, instead of the PatG/17 which is really responsible for Software and would deny the patent).
In the case of IBM's error correction case, the PatG/17 did reject the patent because it was software (they rejected the idea of a distinction between "software as such" and any other form of software), the BGH/10 nullified this decision and had it revised (one main argument being that the software could be potentially have a "technical effect"), and in the revision the PatG/17 rejected it again (because it wasmore likely the errors being corrected were human errors rather than machine errors)[1]. IIRC, I am only studying the happenings at that level of detail since yesterday.
Thanks, Marcus
[1] Apparently they weren't thinking of scanners and OCR. My girl friend in fact developed a similar algorithm in an OCR project at the university around the time the courts made their decisions, without knowing of IBMs patent. It's grotesk that the patent was not outright rejected by common sense at all levels of the system. Apparently the algorithm was obvious to an undergraduated student, not even to talk about the experts skilled in the art.