Partner Nicholas Fox has been featured in PLC Magazine with his article, ‘AI patentability: rift healed but questions remain,’ discussing the decision by the Supreme Court earlier this month in Emotional Perception AI Ltd v Comptroller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks.
The article places the Supreme Court’s decision in the context of how the assessment of the patentability of computer inventions in the EPO and in the English Courts has developed since the 1980s.
Nicholas Fox comments that the Supreme Court’s latest ruling has restored a harmony between the UKIPO and EPO, with the EPO’s “any hardware” approach to the assessment of patentability now to be followed in the UK. The Supreme Court has also modified how novelty and inventive step are to be assessed in the UK so that only aspects of an invention which provide a technical contribution to the prior art will now be taken into account when assessing novelty and inventive step similarly to how they are assessed in the EPO.
Read the article in full here.
This article first appeared in the March 2026 issue of PLC Magazine.
