The Indian Patent Office has refused a patent to the social networking site Facebook’s application for patent to the “method and apparatus for an application crawler” that is used to search the Web for files, including texts and videos.
A crawler is a programme that searches the internet for video and media files, multimedia streaming services and other information to create entries for a search engine index.
The patent application was filed by Truveo Inc in 2007 and this was later assigned to Facebook.
The Patent Office ruling said the crawler was not patentable under various sections of the Patent Act, 1970 as it lacked an inventive step. Rejecting the application, the Assistant Controller ruled that the claims were not allowable under Sections 2(1)(j), 3(k) and 10(4) of the Patents Act, 1970. He also observed that the claims were not clear and the lack of any hardware limitations throughout the claims itself served as the fact the alleged invention lay only in the software or algorithm, which could be implemented by means of any conventional computer system or processor.

Source: ITAG (www.itagbs.com)