| Fujitsu's Application | |
| Court: | Court of Appeal |
| Full Name: | In the Matter of Application No. 9204959.2 by Fujitsu Limited |
| Citations: | EWCA. Civ. 1997. 1174. |
| Judges: | Leggatt LJ, Roch LJ, Aldous LJ |
| Appealed From: | High Court of Justice |
Fujitsu's Application[1] [1997] EWCA Civ 1174 is a 6 March 1997 judgment by the Court of Appeal of England and Wales. The judges' decision was to confirm the refusal of a patent by the United Kingdom Patent Office and by Mr Justice Laddie in the High Court. Lord Justice Aldous heard the appeal before the Court of Appeal.
Fujitsu's claimed invention was a new tool for modelling crystal structures on a computer. A scientist wishing to investigate what would result if he made a new material consisting of a combination of two existing compounds would enter data representing those compounds and how they should be joined into the computer. The computer then automatically generated and displayed the new structure using the data supplied. Previously, the same effect could only have been achieved by assembling plastic models by hand - a time-consuming task.
The claimed invention was certainly a useful tool. However, as claimed, the invention was nothing more than a conventional computer which automatically displayed a crystal structure shown pictorially in a form that would in the past have been produced as a model. The only advance expressed in the claims was the computer program which enabled the combined structure to be portrayed more quickly. The new tool therefore provided nothing that went beyond the normal advantages that are obtained by the use of a computer program. Thus, there was no technical contribution and the application was rejected as being a computer program as such.