The Court of Intellectual Rights will consider Sberbank’s claim against Rospatent for the refusal to register a patent for the recognition of documents, RB.RU has learned. The document would give Sberbank a monopoly on the document verification method.
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The Court of Intellectual Property Rights has scheduled for December 2 a preliminary hearing in Sberbank’s lawsuit against Rospatent over the refusal to register its invention related to the recognition of documents. The application describes a method of verifying documents to determine whether the signer has authority to act on behalf of the applicant.
Rospatent has already twice refused to grant Sberbank a patent for the invention, after which the bank went to court. The credit institution did not respond to RB.RU’s request, sent twice.
- As follows from Rospatent materials, Sberbank was going to register as an invention a method of verifying a set of electronic copies of documents. The bank has developed a way to “extract the applicant and signing entities” from the package using IT technologies, establishing a connection between them that confirms the authority of the signatory to act on behalf of the applicant. The bank was going to do this by analyzing extracts from the Unified State Register of Legal Entities and powers of attorney. Rospatent decided that there was nothing original about this.
“The declared system is only a standard means of storing and executing a computer program, to which no improvements or design changes are made. The ability to process information on documents provided by the declared system consists solely of obtaining information about the existence of a connection between the applicant and the signatory and, therefore, does not guarantee the achievement of any technical results,” says the decision of Rospatent.
Sberbank materials related to this invention and published on the website of the Eurasian Patent Office claim that the invention would make it possible to advance the solution of the problem of fast and high-quality processing of sets of scanned documents for checking their sufficiency, presence of required fields, the powers of the signatories and other information.
“Various solutions capable of processing a set of bank client documents are known from the state of the art, implemented on the basis of the Abbyy FlexiCapture software (a universal platform for intelligent processing of information obtained from any type of documents) and others,” , says the document.
Patent attorney opinion
Head of the patent department of the company “Online Patent” Elena Kuptsova He explained that the patent would give Sberbank the right to prohibit third parties from using the patented solution and would establish a monopoly on such document processing.
“Sberbank could file claims against those who use the same method or system that it requested,” says the head of the patent department. Kuptsova added that a similar Russian patent, number 2739342, which also belongs to Sberbank, had previously been registered. The examination concluded that the application does not meet the patentability requirements.
“On May 17, 2024, Sberbank attempted to challenge this decision in the Patent Disputes Chamber. The meeting took place on July 16, 2024, but the board confirmed the decision to refuse. Taking into account all the arguments, Sberbank’s chances of challenging this decision and obtaining a patent are extremely low, since the application does not meet the requirements of Russian legislation,” the expert said.
Opinion of market participants.
“It is difficult to disagree with Rospatent’s logic. Experts refused to register a patent for a document analysis and recognition system for Sberbank due to lack of novelty. Figuratively speaking, Sber tried to patent the word “milk”. And become a monopolist of all rivers of milk. This would be unacceptable and would limit the development of technical progress in the field of digital assistants, recommendation systems that are given special importance in the context of the data economy,” RB.RU stated. Public relations director of “Biorg” (the company deals with the digitization of images with personal data) Alexander Zverev.
The decision is similar to the case in which Rospatent refused to patent Rosbank the letter P, although under the conditions of a certain graphic and color combination, Zverev recalled.
According to the expert, patents for computer programs are difficult to register and the software is protected in a special way.
“They protect the code itself, in the same way they protect the rights to a literary work. But the method and techniques by which this work was created cannot be patented. The situation with Sber’s failed patent is similar: they did not defend the code, but the concept of how their system worked. This means that other developers would not be able to create a program with similar functionality, even based on their own code. A situation like this could seriously limit competition,” explained a Bioorg representative.
According to Zverev, some time ago the company Bioorg developed a similar system for a client.
“The model is based on natural language processing (NLP) technologies and is capable of extracting semantic entities from the text of a set of documents, comparing them with the meaning of the text and establishing relationships between them. Based on this, artificial intelligence can provide a person with some preliminary decision or recommendation. As you can see, the only thing unique here is customization – development for a specific client. The programmers were guided by general principles and methods that are commonly used at the forefront of the scientific field of machine learning,” Zverev said.
The expert added that in global practice there are entities such as patent trolls, individuals or legal entities that specialize in filing patent claims.
“They go after companies, claiming that the products they offer violate the trolls’ patent rights. The question is whether Sber decided to follow the same path or simply filed an unsuccessful patent application,” Zverev concluded.
Author:
Ekaterina Strukova
Source: RB
I am a professional journalist and content creator with extensive experience writing for news websites. I currently work as an author at Gadget Onus, where I specialize in covering hot news topics. My written pieces have been published on some of the biggest media outlets around the world, including The Guardian and BBC News.
