TABLE OF CONTENTS Both the UK Patents Act 1977 and the European Patent Convention state that a patent shall not be granted for a computer program as such . Similar exclusions apply in other technically advanced countries. Computer programs are widely protected by copyright, but the much broader protection of patents (where the concept is protected and not merely the precise way it is expressed, as in copyright), means that companies with an interest in software make strenuous efforts to get patent protection for programs.
Many of them succeed, although some fail. There have been many decisions, both in the UK Patent Office and the UK courts at various levels and also by the Board of Appeals of the EPO, and on the whole the approaches are similar. Patents are granted for programs which have a technical character. The technical character can relate to a technical problem or a technical field, but merely running a program on a computer does not constitute a technical character. There must be a useful effect in the world outside the computer, or an improvement in the system which includes a computer running the program, or an improvement to the computer itself.
Looking first at useful effects outside the computer, Vicom Systems applied for a patent through the European route for the digital processing of images by use of a convolution integral. Although the processing was carried out by a computer program operating on numbers, those numbers represented physical entities, that is,...
