Review of EPO Software Decisions in 2021

In 2021, reporting of the case law of the EPO Boards of Appeal in the field of IT & computer-implemented inventions has been dominated by two topics: the Enlarged Board’s decision relating to simulation and the rejection of two applications for inventions created by the artificial intelligence “DABUS” for failure to designate a human inventor. The simulation decision could well become the most important decision in this field as it endorses and summarises 20 years of case law since the well-known Comvik decision. The DABUS decisions follow the line taken in the UK and US that a human inventor must be named in any patent application and may be the start of a long debate on AI inventorship but are unlikely to have an immediate impact on day to day practice for most innovative companies. We discuss below these cases and other cases of interest published in 2021.

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