The date and contents of internet disclosures should be assessed
on the balance of probabilities, said IPO Deputy Director Ben
Micklewright, acting for the Comptroller General of Patents. In the
European Patent Office, though, a higher standard of proof is
required.
HSBC France wanted to patent a method for authenticating users
of a website. The method it described would cover a bank sending a
password to a user and the user being asked to select particular
characters from that password at login. HSBC applied for the patent
in 2005 but claimed a priority date of 2nd July 2004, the date of
an earlier French application.
The patent examiner rejected the application, citing evidence of
prior art and HSBC appealed that ruling.
Under the Patents Act 1977, a patent can be granted only if the
invention "is not obvious to a person skilled in the art, having
regard to the state of the art". Prior art comprises all matter
made available to the public, whether in the UK or elsewhere, by
written or oral description, by use or in any other way, before the
priority date of the invention.
The examiner based his objections on two disclosures, one of
them a patent filed by Fujitsu Services, the other an article
that appeared on the website of Computing magazine with a date of
20th February 2004 – five months earlier than the priority
date.
That article described an authentication solution from Lloyds
TSB that reduces the risk from keystroke-logging software. It
stated: "After a customer logs on to the site and fills in access
details, a menu appears asking for a random set of numbers or
letters from memorable data. The customer then uses the mouse to
click on the characters in the box."
HSBC disputed the date of the article. Computing magazine is
published in print and online but the examiner was unable to obtain
a paper copy of the relevant issue. Micklewright checked the
digital library of internet pages at Archive.org but it was not
there. "Two issues therefore arise," he wrote. "Firstly, was this
article actually made available to the public on 20 February 2004?
Secondly, has it been altered since its initial publication?"
HSBC said that the UK should follow a decision of the European
Patent Office's (EPO) Technical Board of Appeal, in the case of
Konami Limited. According to Micklewright, that decision "suggests
that a higher burden of proof than that applied to more traditional
documents should be applied to internet documents."
"In particular they say that in determining whether an internet
disclosure was made available to the public the same questions
should be answered as with prior use or oral disclosure. At the EPO
such issues and the questions of when the internet disclosure was
made available to the public, what was made available and under
which circumstances it was made available to the public, must be
proved 'beyond reasonable doubt' rather than on the 'balance of
probabilities'," wrote Micklewright.
That decision also found that some sources are more trustworthy
than others. The EPO wrote that "where a web site belonging to a
reputable or trusted publisher publishes online electronic versions
of paper publications, content and date can be taken at face value
and the need for supporting evidence dispensed with.”
However, Micklewright said that the UK takes a different
approach to the burden of proof. The Manual of Patent Practice, he
noted, states that a case of prior use need not be proved "up to
the hilt".
"I do not consider that I am bound to follow the EPO's reasoning
in this case," wrote Micklewright. "Rather it seems to me more
appropriate, in line with UK cases in this general area … that the
date and contents of internet disclosures be assessed on the
balance of probabilities, just as it is for cases of alleged prior
use or, for that matter, dating any other categories of prior
disclosure."
HSBC France accepted that the correct standard of proof is the
balance of probabilities but argued that this is not an absolute
standard and that the nature of the issue may affect "the kind and
the cogency of the evidence necessary to bring the scale down on
one side or the other."
Micklewright concluded that it was "highly likely" that the
article did appear in a paper version of Computing magazine on or
around 20th February 2004 but said that even if that was not the
case, its website was "highly reputable".
He added: "In fact, even if I was to follow the reasoning in
[the EPO decision], I would have concluded that the date of the
internet article had been proved 'up to the hilt' and could be
taken at face value without the need for supporting evidence given
the trusted and reliable nature of the websites in question and
their links with paper publications."
Micklewright also ruled that, based on the prior art available,
the application lacked an inventive step. He said that "the claimed
invention is obvious in light of the disclosure" of the Computing
article. He said that it also lacked an inventive step over the
method described in the Fujitsu Services patent.
Micklewright said that in any event the invention is excluded
from patentability for being a business method. Its contribution
"is not technical in nature," he wrote, refusing the patent
application.
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