Zusammenfassung von EPC2000 Art 056 für die Entscheidung T0366/20 vom 27.01.2023

In T 366/20 the board was of the opinion, that no technical effect of the distinguishing features could be derived over the whole scope of the claim. The application related to devices and methods for managing the identity of media content data. It is common for the same media content to be available from numerous sources, each of which may use a different proprietary identification scheme for describing, via the use of metadata, its creator or the artist's name, the (song) title, track number, or other associated information. The appellant had argued that the objective technical problem to be solved was "how to provide, at a client node, a more efficient non-duplicate downloading and file identity reconciliation". According to the appellant, the claimed solution provided downloading of non- duplicate media files along with reconciliation of file identities based on received metadata of media files selected for possible download. By contrast, the prior art taught a solution for downloading of non-duplicate media files based on received initial portions of the files selected for possible download and was concerned at most with reconciling metadata based on file identifiers. As a further advantage, the claimed solution avoided conflicts due to having copies of the same file identifier (associated with respective copies of the same file) that were locally stored in association with the same or similar metadata. The board stated that claim 1 did not define how the "first master identifier" received from a server node corresponded to the "first set of metadata" provided by the client to this server node. Since the first master identifier seemed to be determined based only on the metadata, and since the metadata may be incomplete or incorrect or otherwise not identifying for the media content or may not capture differences in actual content of the media content data files (for example due to different versions of the same song, movie etc.) the result of the claimed method seemed to be essentially unpredictable with respect to the detection of duplicate media content files over the whole scope of the claim. Moreover, the claim did not define what "processing" was performed on the first master identifier to identify whether a second master identifier was stored in the database of local identification data and metadata that matched the first master identifier. Since there was no technical effect over the whole scope of the claim, no technical problem was solved over the whole scope of the claim and the claimed method therefore lacked an inventive step.