The much criticised exclusion of computer programs from patent protection came under scrutiny as the inventor of a technique used to transmit virus-free documents around the world failed to convince the Court of Appeal that it is a special case.
A company had come up with the idea of allowing automatic retrieval of data from a remote computer to a local computer using email. A list of documents available on the remote computer would be stored on the local computer and the invention had the advantage of both suppressing viruses and enabling documents to be viewed at a distance without a continuous Internet connection being maintained.
The company wanted to register a patent to protect its idea, but fell foul of Section 1 of the Patents Act 1977, which provides that computer programs cannot be patented. The company’s application was refused by the Comptroller General of Patents, whose decision was subsequently upheld by the High Court.
In dismissing the company’s appeal, the Court of Appeal found that the invention was no more than the computerisation of a process which could already be done without the help of a computer. Whether the idea was novel was irrelevant and the invention in fact achieved no more than ‘simple automation’ of the document retrieval process.
The transfer of documents across the Internet did not make a ‘sufficiently technical’ contribution to existing developments in the field and the invention operated in a way which was typical of a computer program. That, the Court observed, was ‘exactly what Parliament intended to exclude’ from patent protection.