In Europe, inventions that utilise distributed ledger technology
will generally fall under the heading of "computer-implemented
inventions (CIIs)." The EPO has an established body of case
law for assessing the patentability of CIIS. When doing so, the EPO
follows a two-step process, which can be understood with reference
to the flow diagram below.
The first step in the process is to consider whether the claimed
invention has technical character i.e. do the claims include any
technical components, or is the invention solely an administrative
or business process? In the absence of any technical features in
the claims, the invention will be deemed to be excluded from
patentability. Since any invention that makes use of a distributed
ledger will, by its nature, utilise a computer or computer network,
this hurdle can be overcome quite simply by making reference to
this hardware in the claim, or in the case of a method, defining
the method as a "computer-implemented"
