CIPA and IP Federation assisting the Supreme Court

On 21-22 July, the UK Supreme Court heard from the parties in case UKSC/2024/0131 – an appeal to the Court by Emotional Perception AI Ltd relating to patentability of an artificial neural network (“ANN”) that provides media file recommendations based on the file’s physical properties (instead of only categories identified by humans).

Because of the important issues raised by the case, and the importance of clarity and consistency when assessing patentability of computer-implemented inventions, CIPA and IP Federation collaborated on this intervention to the Supreme Court.

From the start of the hearing, it was clear that the Justices welcomed the intervention from CIPA and IP Federation. The intervention was referred to by the Supreme Court Justices at the very beginning of the hearing and at the very end when Lord Briggs expressed his thanks for our work. It was referred to many times by the Appellant during the hearing.

CIPA’s main drafting team (Mike Jennings and Richard Kennedy from Venner Shipley LLP, and Simon Davies from Altair IP) wishes to thank IP Federation for a very positive collaboration, which improved the intervention and helped us to align with industry views. Many in-house attorneys provided valuable input. We are also very grateful to Caitlin Heard and David Pountney from CMS’s legal team, who provided guidance on court procedure and a template for our arguments, as well as their help with editing and handling the submissions to the Court. CIPA is very pleased to have assisted the Court and very pleased that the highly respected Lord Kitchin agreed to join the Supreme Court panel.

Date published: 22 July 2025