A CP patent in European policy Dr Ali Al-fatlawi

The legal position. The EPC in Article 52(2) does not permit a CP as such to be patented according to paragraphs 2 and 3 which include the phrase “as such” “Paragraph 2 shall exclude patentability of the subject-matter or activities referred to in that provision only to the extent to which a European patent application or European patent relates to such subject-matter or activities as such.”through stipulation that It could be said that a “CP as such” is the opposite of a technical CP.. It could be “… implied by the physical features of an entity or the nature of an activity, or may be conferred on a non-technical activity by the use of technical means”. In other words, it has been interpreted as ‘requiring both that an invention must belong to a field of technology and that the invention must make a technical contribution to the technological state of the art’

The judicial position In the past, the judicial position within the EPO approach was not to grant patent protection for a CP as such since it does not have the requirement of capability of industrial application the EPO has decided that patentability could be conferred upon any invention of a technical character The phrase “technical character” means that “the programmer must have had technical considerations beyond ‘merely’ finding a computer algorithm to carry out some procedure a CP as such which is obviously excluded from the patent system because; a)A CP as such is not an invention b)It does not have a technical character c)The EPO assumes that “software” as such is the opposite of “technical software”. d)Finally, a CP is an intangible thing, as mentioned earlier in chapter 2, which is only information and the patent system does not protect information. However, the phrase ‘technical character’ could evolve in the future to include a CP as such to be patentable.