US print procurement company e-Lynxx has been awarded a patent covering competitive tendering of a specified item on an electronic platform, such as print management.
The company plans to licence the business method to users.
William Gindlesperger, patent inventor and chief executive of e-Lynxx, said: "Every organisation with an electronic procurement system... that follows the steps outlined in this new patent, will need a licence to use the patented methodology."
However, the UK patent office said that merely transferring a process that already existed to an electronic platform was unlikely to result in an enforceable patent.
"Merely computerising the whole procedure wouldn't be anything you could patent," said Jim Calvert, deputy director at the UK Intellectual Property Office.
And even if it got through as a European patent, its validity would only be asserted in the UK through a successful case under UK law.
The patent, which was published in 1998, describes "an apparatus and method of selecting a lowest bidding vendor from a plurality of vendors of a customised good or service".
Gindlesperger claims the scope of the business method would be huge, estimating that an average of up to 30% of a company's revenues could be put down to something related to this method.
However, the news comes as a pivotal case on business methods patents in the US is being decided that could severely limit the scope of Gindlesperger's ambitions.
The case, In re Bilski, was an appeal against a rejection of a business methods patent based on hedging against likely weather conditions. The Appeals court upheld the rejection, largely overturning a controversial ruling on a previous case known as State Street, also in 1998, that granted patentability to business methods patents.
In re Bilski decided that an abstract idea that is not tied to a specific machine or apparatus and that does not result in a physical transformation isn't patentable.
Pamela Jones, founder and editor of the Groklaw legal website, told PrintWeek: "Business methods are still patentable, but only if they are tied to a particular machine or apparatus and/or are transformative, like changing the physical state of something.
"I don't think [Gindlesperger patent] meets the second prong, and as for the first, I guess only litigation will determine that."
UK set to sidestep US patent affecting print management
The UK looks to be safe from a potentially powerful patent that could affect print management and other similar electronic procurement systems.
