Key points
- The title of the application in this appeal is "METHOD AND STRUCTURE FOR SIMPLIFIED CODING OF DISPLAY PAGES FOR OPERATING A CLOSED CIRCUIT E-COMMERCE"
- Claim 1 begins with: "A method for connecting and operating a closed circuit e-commerce entity comprising at least one shopping terminal, at least one provider and at least one entity center"
- The Board, however, finds claim 1 to be inventive. The decision may illustrate that non-technical features do not contribute to inventive step under the Comvik approach, but that there strictly speaking no penalty for specifying non-technical features under the Comvik approach either, if the claim additionally recites non-obvious technical features.
- Claim 1 specifies "said shopping terminal including a touch screen, a CPU and a second memory is connected with said building server via an interface including a CPU and a first memory"
- The Board: " the board considers that the "CPU" mentioned in distinguishing feature (ii) can only be interpreted as relating to an additional CPU, i.e. in addition to the regular CPU that each server - including the server disclosed in document D2 - possesses. The same applies analogously to the "memory" mentioned in distinguishing feature (iii)."
- "The objective technical problem is how to support a large number of kiosks without overwhelming the server. This problem is solved by distinguishing features (ii) and (iii), since adding a CPU and a memory for processing kiosk requests at the interface reduces the load on the server CPU. However, neither this problem nor its solution are disclosed or hinted at in the prior art at hand."
- "Therefore the board concludes that the subject-matter of claim 1 involves an inventive step."
- As to the description: "The board notes that the [allowed set of claims] basically corresponds to the claims originally published and that the description as published supports these claims. Hence there is no need to adapt the description to the present claims in order to meet the requirements of Article 84 EPC in the present case." (italics added)
EPO
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/2022/10/t-110820-closed-circuit-e-commerce.html
