Patent Baristas

The U.S. Supreme Court has decided to take up the In re Bilski case.  The Court will review a decision in a patent case which questions what things are patentable, including software and business strategies.  The applicants have filed a Petition for Writ of Certiorari to the Supreme Court to appeal from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in In re Bilski.  See Bilski v. Doll (USPTO).

Questions Presented:

1. Whether the Federal Circuit erred by holding that a “process” must be tied to a particular machine or apparatus, or transform a particular article into a different state or thing (“machine-or-transformation” test), to be eligible for patenting under 35 U.S.C. § 101, despite this Court’s precedent declining to limit the broad statutory grant of patent eligibility for “any” new and useful process beyond excluding patents for “laws of nature, physical phenomena, and abstract ideas.”
2. Whether the Federal Circuit’s “machine-or-transformation” test for patent eligibility, which effectively forecloses meaningful patent protection to many business methods, contradicts the clear Congressional intent that patents protect “method[s] of doing or conducting business.”  35 U.S.C. § 273.

The Supreme Court has not considered what is patentable subject matter since 1981. This case now raises the most question of what can be patented? Are patents only for manufacturing processes that are tied to a particular machine or produce some physical transformation? Or do patents also embrace modern business processes that do not depend on a particular machine or device?

The en banc Federal Circuit held that Bilski’s claims are not eligible for patenting and set forth a single, “definitive” test for determining whether a process is patent-eligible under § 101: a process is patent-eligible only if  “(1) it is tied to a particular machine or apparatus, or (2) it transforms a particular article into a different state or thing.”

In Bilski, the Federal Circuit seized on a sentence from Diamond v. Diehr, 450 U.S. 175, 184 (1981), quoted from Benson, 409 U.S. at 70, that “[t]ransformation and reduction of an article ‘to a different state or thing’ is the clue to the patentability of a process claim that does not include particular machines” (emphasis added).

The majority held that this test was not “optional or merely advisory” but rather “the only applicable test” for patent-eligible processes.  In doing so, the Federal Circuit majority overruled its earlier decisions in State Street Bank and AT&T to the extent they relied on a “useful, concrete, and tangible result” as the test for patent eligibility under § 101.

See the Bilski Petition here.