The project deals with the technical criteria in patent law. Over the past twenty years, the nature of inventions registered at the European Patent Office have changed. In fact, nowadays most of the registrations concern inventions that belong to the field of “new technologies”, meaning, essentially, computer-related and biotechnological inventions.
Last Update: 01.06.12
The European Patent Convention encounters certain difficulties in dealing with inventions in the field of new technologies. The reason is that inventions in these fields are often closely related to “ideas” and products of “nature”, which are both excluded from patent protection since the very beginnings of the patent system. Traditionally, the requirement of technicity draws the line between what can and what cannot be protected by a patent. However, up to today the concept of technicity has not been defined, although it is well accepted that a technical object is something that produces a material effect on nature.
As a consequence, the main difficulty lies in the nature of patent law itself, which was enacted at a time when inventions were mostly mechanical. In contrast, today’s computer related inventions concern new mathematical formulas and are not materialized in physical objects. However, it cannot be denied that software has become part of our everyday life and a significant contributor to the global economy. The amount of investments required has grown accordingly and it was not long before software companies asked the authorities for protection of such investments.
The project deals with the question of how to draw the line between patentable subject matter and the public domain with regard to software. The current findings suggest that that the concept of technicity should not require a material effect. In fact, the word “technical” has a philosophic origin.
Mathieu Dhenne
Prof. Dr. J.-Ch. Galloux
Funktionen, Zielsetzungen, Werte und Wertungskriterien
