In December 2023, the UK IPO announced an immediate change to the examination of patent applications involving artificial neural networks (ANN). Patent examiners should no longer object to inventions involving an ANN under the “program for a computer” exclusion in the Patents Act.
This prompt response by the IPO follows the High Court ruling in Emotional Perception AI Ltd v Comptroller-General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks [2023] EWHC 2948 (Ch) which overturned the hearing officer’s decision. The judge concluded that a patent for an ANN which makes an emotional analysis of pieces of music is not to be considered a patent for a computer program as such.
In this article we take a brief look at this decision and the IPO’s new guidelines.
Emotional Perception’s patent
Emotional Perception AI’s application claims an ANN-based process for associating musical tracks together based on both their emotional and musical similarity, with songs of the same genre and mood being considered closely related. This is then to be used to select a new track that is sufficiently similar to any given input track.
This similarity assessment is done by the ANN first analysing human-written descriptions of the mood of each piece, using a natural language processing algorithm to determine which descriptions are most similar and quantifying this similarity into a “distance” between them. The AI then analyses the tracks automatically, on a number of (human-specified) musical qualities such as tone and speed, to create a second distance. Finally, the mood-based distance is then modified to either be longer or shorter based on the musical distance value, to create an overall similarity score.
A brief summary of how ANNs work is included at the end of this article. The key feature is that they function through having a set of “weights” developed through training: these weights are adapted autonomously by the ANN until their analysis of training data provides the same outcome as the human-determined “right” outcome for that data, and are then immutable in further operation of the ANN.
Legal background
The Patents Act 1977 excludes from patent protection “a program for a computer … as such”. (section 1(2)(c)).
High Court decision
The IPO hearing officer had rejected Emotional Perception’s application on the basis of the computer program exclusion. Emotional Perception had appealed to the High Court.
The judge, Sir Anthony Mann, considered separately whether (1) this ANN would be a computer program, and then (2) whether (if it were a computer program) it would nonetheless be patentable for creating a technical effect beyond just being a simple program. In both cases, Sir Anthony Mann appears to have adopted a broad and permissive…
FULL ARTICLE AVAILABLE ON PATENTHUB
For further information, please contact:
Matthew Noble, Partner, Bird & Bird
matthew.noble@twobirds.com
