A Review Of BL O/0894/26 Emotional Perception AI Ltd: Can A Subjective Improvement Ever Be Technical?

The refusal of BL O/0894/26 (Emotional Perception AI Ltd) based on lack of inventive step was, from a European perspective, hardly surprising. After the case was remitted back to the examining division, most practitioners were expecting the applicant to struggle with demonstrating technical character and hence inventive step. Nevertheless, I found the reasoning in the decision to be largely unsatisfactory overall. 

In particular, the refusal presupposes that a “semantically better” file recommendation is “not enough to be considered a technical effect” because it is “better only in a subjective psychological sense” (para. 53). In this article, I challenge this line of reasoning, which I think, at best, is incomplete.