[Patents] Technical effect

[PILCH Hartmut phm@a2e.de]

> Do you mean to say that Amazon's one-click patent would not have been
> granted by the UK Patent Office?

The EPO's examiner is said to have responded to Amazon's applicatio by 
sending some potentially novelty destroying material.  Amazon then,
it is said, withdrew its application.

Nowadays every patent office will try hard to portray itself as better
than the USPTO by not granting known scandal patents.  And they can quite
easily do that, because they have no clear criteria for most of their
concepts.

However, according to several comparative reports, the EPO's standards of
inventivity are lower than those of the USTPO.  The USPTO tended to refuse
some of the sample patents that the EPO granted but never vice versa.

Of course some patents like One-Click are already under attack in the US
by the time they arrive on the EPO examiner's desk.  It is then easy for
the EPO and its friends to say "Our system is better, see, we haven't
patented One-Click".

In principle, the EPO grants patents of the One-Click type and quite a few
of them in fact. The mere fact that a mouse is used as an integral part of
the innovation counts as a "technical effect" in the EPO's eyes.  Even
"searching for a faulty string in a text" has a "technical effect"
according to the EPO.

As Britain (which courts?) is already using the same terminology als the
EPO, I can't see how they could refuse Internet patents of the One-Click
type.

-phm