UK Patents Act Section 1, After Emotional Perception

The United Kingdom reaches the same exclusions as the European Patent Convention through its own statute.

Section 1(1) sets four conditions: the invention must be new, involve an inventive step, be capable of industrial application, and not fall within the exclusions.

Section 1(2) declares that certain things are not inventions, grouping a program for a computer with schemes for performing mental acts, playing games and doing business.

And the subsection closes with the limit that carries all of European software practice: the declaration bites only to the extent a patent relates to the excluded thing as such.

The statute states the exclusion. Case law supplies the method for deciding whether a claim falls inside it, and that method changed in February 2026.

What did not change is section 1 itself. The four conditions stand, the list in 1(2) stands, and the as such limit still carries the weight. What changed is how a UK decision-maker reads that limit, which now follows the EPO interpretation rather than the four steps.

One thing worth not overcorrecting into. Clearing the exclusion is not the same as being patentable. Novelty, inventive step, industrial application and sufficiency all remain, and the Court expressly declined to settle everything downstream.

What This Does Not Decide

• It does not say whether any invention is excluded.
• It is UK law and has no application in the United States.
• The as-such limit is doing enormous work in a very short phrase, which is why the case law exists and why the method for reading it changed in 2026.
• It does not say hardware makes software patentable. Clearing the initial exclusion leaves every other requirement in place.

Educational, not legal advice. Whether any of this reaches a particular application is a determination for a registered patent practitioner.