According to an article of Bird & Bird, the UK Court of Appeal has recently ruled that an Emotional Perception AI’s neural-network based music recommendation tool should be treated as any other computer program under patent law, thus overturning a previous High Court decision. The ruling was delivered by Birss LJ, with the concurrence of Davies LJ and Arnold LJ. This decision dismisses the High Court's earlier finding that the unique features of artificial neural networks (ANNs) differentiated them enough to fall outside the traditional ban on patents for "a program for a computer ... as such".

The Court of Appeal's judgment pivoted on whether the AI tool, despite being a computer program, made a "technical contribution" beyond just being a program. The Court found that the ANN's features did not impact this evaluation, asserting that the function of the program itself (in this case, music recommendation) was all that mattered. Emotional Perception AI’s application was for an ANN-based tool to recommend music tracks based on semantic similarity, functioning through autonomously adapted weights developed via a backpropagation process. Despite the advanced technology, the Court maintained that this process was essentially a computer program.

Birss LJ defined a computer program as “a set of instructions for a computer to do something”, and found that Emotional Perception AI's ANN-based tool fit this definition. The Court further noted that the process of training the ANN and its final output did not contribute technically to the program itself. Therefore, the primary contribution of the tool was deemed to be the recommendation of files based on semantic similarities, which is not patentable as it is merely the presentation of information.

This ruling reaffirms the traditional approach to patenting AI inventions in the UK, which focuses on the "technical contribution" test. The previous High Court's decision had temporarily broadened the scope for patenting AI implementations, but the Court of Appeal's ruling has now reverted these changes. Until further notice or potential appeal to the Supreme Court, ANN-based inventions will only be patentable if they make a "technical contribution", a challenge given the nature of computer programs.