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As you may know, every Tuesday, we publish short summaries of decisions of the EPO’s Boards of Appeal on our European-software-patents blog that by now lists a huge number of decisions concerning the question of what the EPO considers technical.
An interesting post we have recently published refers to decision T 426 of 2016. In this decision, the EPO comprehensively outlines why the method step of appraising water quality for being used in an investment instrument is a pure business act that cannot contribute to inventive step.
Notably, the Board in charge also provides some interesting comments on the “contribution approach” for determining whether an invention has technical character. The EPO took this approach at the time but has abandoned it in the meantime.
