United Kingdom: Intellectual Property Office Hearing Officer refused patent application in Emotional Perception AI Limited v Comptroller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks

On 22 June 2022, the Hearing Officer of the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office refused the patent application filed by Emotional Perception AI Limited (decision BL O/542/22). The Hearing Officer held that the claimed invention was excluded from patentability under section 1(2)(c) of the Patents Act 1977 as a program for a computer as such. The Hearing Officer found that neither the training nor the implementation of an artificial neural network, nor the recommendation of a file with semantic similarity, produced a technical effect, with the latter characterised as subjective and cognitive in nature.