EP 3 123 424 A1=WO 2015/145131, relates to a remote transaction system, method an point of sale (PoS) terminal.
Brief outline of the case
The application was refused for lack of IS. The applicant appealed.
During OP before the board, the applicant withdrew all previous requests and kept a new MR.
The board admitted the MR and decided maintenance according this request and remitted for the adaptation of the description.
The board’s decision
The board admitted the new MR into the proceedings under Art 13(2) RPBA, as it found that exceptional circumstances were present. These arose from the IS reasoning in the decision under appeal.
Common general knowledge
The ED relied on the skilled person’s CGK in the field of NFC-enabled mobile phones, with eight documents cited merely as illustrative examples.
However, the use of vague terms like “standard NFC payment” and “standard OTA”, along with broad references to entire chapters or sections, made it difficult for both the applicant and the board to understand what the ED actually considered to form part of this CGK and how it mapped to the claim features.
Decision on inventive step
As a result, a meaningful discussion on IS was only possible during the OP before the board. The IS and clarity objections raised at that stage directly triggered the filing of the new request.
The board considered that, among the documents cited in the appealed decision, D4 belongs to the CGK and represents the CPA, as it is the only document that suggests using a user device, namely the user’s mobile phone, as a card reader in the context of online transactions, with the aim of addressing the typical problems associated with card-not-present payments.
However, unlike in claim 1, the user’s phone in D4 functions as a token reader: during a transaction on the merchant’s website, the user is prompted to present their card to the phone, which reads the card and generates a dynamic code.
This code must then be manually entered by the user into the website, which forwards it to a verification host. In other words, the phone supports user/card authentication, but does not act as a PoS terminal capable of completing the payment transaction by directly communicating with the payment service host.
The ED considered the PoS configuration profile to represent a set of business rules or preferences defined by the merchant. It also held that deploying such preferences to the user device, and the three differentiating features from the CPA, was a straightforward implementation of a non-technical business requirement on a generally known payment system architecture.
The board held that, while the abstract goal of avoiding the transmission of card data to the merchant may come from the business person, the differentiating features define a specific technical solution for achieving it.
In particular, the payment service host is configured to retrieve a PoS configuration associated with the merchant and to send it to the user device, which then configures a secure application accordingly. This enables the user device to read card data and communicate directly with the payment service host to complete the transaction.
These steps involve modifying the existing system infrastructure, including how the user device is configured and integrated into the payment flow. Such changes require technical knowledge of the system architecture and fall within the expertise of the technically skilled person – not the business person, who may define the desired business objective but lacks the competence to specify the structural and functional changes needed to implement it. The board referred to T 1463/11 and T 1749/14.
The board therefore concluded that the differentiating features contribute to the technical character of the invention and must be assessed for obviousness in light of the prior art.
For the board, the differentiating features provide an alternative online transaction system in which the user’s payment card data are not shared with the merchant.
Starting from D4, the board did not see how the skilled person would arrive at the solution of claim 1. While the board agreed with the ED that the remote provisioning of software on user devices was generally known at the priority date, there is no apparent reason, except by hindsight, to change the user device’s functionality so that it acts as a PoS terminal directly completing the transaction.
For these reasons, the board judged that claim 1 involved an IS over D4.
Comments
The present decision reminds first instance divisions, that CGK has to be more than mere illustrative examples. It has to be tailored to the situation and properly defined, i.e. “mapped to the claim features”.
In the present case, the CGK, properly mapped against the claim features, even allowed to define the differentiating features as being technical and led to a grant.
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