Key points
- The appeal is against the refusal of a patent application with applicant Google.
- The Board, on inventive step: " Furthermore, even if distinguishing features (b) and (c) could be seen to plausibly improve the "quality" of the translated query in the sense that it leads to search results that are "better" in the sense of closer in meaning to the desired search results, this would not be a technical effect (see decisions T 1569/05, Reasons 3.4 to 3.7; T 598/14, Reasons 2.3 and 2.4)."
- T 1569/05: " The appellants regard the invention as belonging to the technical field of utilizing a natural language as a search input. In their view, the invention makes a technical contribution in a field not excluded from patentability," " In the Board's view, neither the mathematical model of meaning according to D3 nor the modified model according to the invention are within the technical area, since only the meaning of the words determines how they are represented, stored and selected, and since mathematical algorithms completely define the processing. In this respect the present invention is similar to the case T 52/85 - Listing of semantically related expressions/IBM (not published in OJ EPO), where the deciding board held that automatically generating a list of expressions semantically related to an input linguistic expression is basically not of a technical nature but a matter of the meaning of those expressions, ie of their abstract linguistic information content."
- T 52/85: "Such a semantical relationship is basically not of a technical nature but a matter of the meaning of those expressions, i.e. of their abstract linguistic information content; it does not relate to any physical entity. A semantical relationship can be found by performing mental acts only, with no technical means involved. This does not necessarily mean that any system automatically concatenating, in place of a human being, semantically related expressions to a list is excluded from patentability. Rather, this will depend on whether the manner in which it is automated, involves features which make a contribution in a field outside the range of matters excluded from patentability under Article 52(2) and (3) EPC."
- "the appellant's observation on document D1 does not call into question the board's finding that the distinguishing features provide no technical contribution over document D1. Hence, the subject-matter of claim 1 lacks inventive step (Article 56 EPC)."
EPO T 0955/20
The link to the decision is provided after the jump, as well as (an extract of) the text of the decision.
source http://justpatentlaw.blogspot.com/2022/07/t-095520-ii-better-search-results-are.html
