June came with four new decisions in the
EUROPEAN SOFTWARE PATENTS knowledge base relating to graphical
user interfaces, computer simulations and business
methods:
Patents for graphical user interfaces
Improvements in
graphical user interfaces are sometimes
difficult to protect with patents when they are closely related to
the presentation of information (which is as such excluded from
patentability).
In one case, the European Patent Office acknowledged that
precomputing user habit information for a graphical user interface
of a mobile device is technical. However, this difference over
the prior art was found to be obvious, since in the art of
computing, "precomputation" was found to be a well known
method of speeding up program execution.