AUSTRALIA
May 17, 2016
On February 1st, 2016, the Australian Patent Office released the new guidelines for assessing whether computer-related inventions relate to patentable subject matter.
These considerations take into account, among other things, (i) whether the contribution of the claimed invention is technical in nature; (ii) whether the invention solves a technical problem within the computer, (iii) whether the claimed method merely requires generic computer implementation, (iv) whether the computer is merely an intermediary or tool for performing the method or (v) whether the alleged invention lies in the way the method or scheme is carried out in a computer.