U.K. Report Attempts to Define "Technical Contribution"

The results from the U.K. Patent Office's workshops on how to define the term "technical contribution" as a hurdle for patentability in the Computer Implemented Inventions (CII) Directive were published on May 26, 2005. The report shows "just how difficult it can be to come up with a definition which is both easy to apply and which gives the 'right' result in terms of allowing patents for computer-implemented technical inventions but blocking patents for non-technical software," said Sean Dennehey, Director of Patents for the UK. "One possible approach seems to be combining a positive statement of what 'technical contribution' means with a negative statement of what it doesn’t mean."