The European Patent Office and its handling of Computer Implemented Inventions

Abstract

The speakers will introduce the activities of the European Patent Office, followed by a discussion on the patentability of CIIs. About the speakers Georg Weber is the Director at the EPO in Munich and Head of Directorate 1870. He is responsible for search, examination and opposition procedures in the technical areas of computer and network security, cryptography, computer arithmetic and mobile applications. His team comprises 70 patent examiners who are technical experts in these fields. Georg Weber joined the EPO in 1988 and is director since more than 10 years. He started his career in the office initially as a patent examiner and worked in different technical areas of chemistry and mechanics. Birger Koblitz is patent examiner at the EPO in Munich in the technical field of computer security. Before joining the office in 2009, he earned a PhD in Experimental Particle Physics from the University of Hamburg, and worked at CERN in the IT department supporting the experiments in their Grid Computing activities.</p