Source: Marks & Clerk

IPOS has launched a feedback exercise in Singapore inviting IP practitioners to comment on the UK Supreme Court’s decision in Emotional Perception AI Limited v Comptroller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks [2026] UKSC 3, with submissions open from 17 April to 14 May 2026. The case concerned a media‑recommendation system that uses a trained artificial neural network (ANN) to identify perceived emotional content in media files (for example, music), and raised the question whether such a system constitutes patentable subject matter. The UK Supreme Court rejected the Aerotel approach and set out a new framework that treats claims including any physical hardware as passing an initial eligibility assessment, leaving inventive‑step analysis to consider only “eligible” claim features.

IPOS’s current practice follows the Aerotel/Macrossan test, requiring claim construction, identification of the invention’s contribution, and assessment of whether that contribution falls exclusively within excluded subject matter; an AI algorithm merely running on generic hardware does not, by itself, confer patentability. The office asks three specific questions of practitioners: the relevance of Emotional Perception to Singapore’s patent practice and which aspects matter most; whether the decision clarifies the interaction between patentable subject matter and inventive step; and what issues or challenges might arise for applicants and practitioners under the new approach. The summary notes differences in statutory and jurisprudential background — Singapore’s Patents Act lacks an explicit list of excluded subject matter and exclusions have evolved by case law and practice — and recalls that the Singapore Court of Appeal has said Singapore is not obliged to follow EPO jurisprudence, leaving open whether Singapore will adopt the UK’s new direction. Practitioners active in AI and computer‑implemented inventions are encouraged to submit views before the 14 May 2026 deadline.