AI Inventions – A New Permissive Regime In The UK?

In recent years, the UK Intellectual Property Office (UK IPO) attitude towards the patenting of AI inventions has been fairly strict. However, a High Court decision handed down last week has adopted a much more permissive approach which puts the UK out of step with the practice of the European Patent Office (EPO).

The High Court decision ([2023] EWHC 2948 (Ch)) arises from an appeal by Emotional Perception AI Ltd against a UK IPO decision to refuse its patent application under section 1(2) of the UK Patents Act (excluded fields).

The invention relates to training a neural network to perceive semantic similarity or dissimilarity between media files such as music files, and then using the trained neural network to recommend a file which is semantically similar to a given input, including sending the file to a user device over a communications network.