Case: T 1851/22 | Board: Technical Board of Appeal 3.5.01 | Date: 12 December 2025
Key Takeaways
1. Algorithmic ≠ Technical. The Board made clear that steps conceived by a computer programmer — rather than a business person — do not automatically gain technical character. Code is still just code unless it solves a technical problem through a technical effect.
2. Automating a non-technical process on generic hardware is never inventive. Implementing a business workflow more efficiently on a standard computer does not clear the inventive step bar under Article 56 EPC, no matter how sophisticated the automation looks on paper.
Summary
Auctane, LLC. (the company behind Stamps.com and ShipStation) appealed the EPO Examining Division’s refusal of their patent application for a system that automates the generation of shipping documentation. The core idea: skip user prompts and warnings upfront, apply default settings, and let a background subprocess handle order processing — only flagging truly critical issues that cannot be resolved automatically.
The Board dismissed the appeal. It found that the claimed method was essentially a non-technical, administrative workflow being run on a generic computer. The « intelligent generation subprocess » amounted to nothing more than loading and executing a software module — well-known at the priority date. Crucially, the Board rejected Auctane’s argument that defining when failure-state mitigation kicks in constitutes a technical contribution, finding it either non-technical by nature or self-evident in context. Since all four claim requests suffered from the same lack of inventive step, the appeal was dismissed in its entirety.