Patent Law

Bilking Bilski

By Gary Odom and Jordan Kuhn

35 U.S.C. § 101 cedes patentability to "any new and useful process," without further qualification. The CAFC Bilski ruling, limiting process claims to being tied to a particular apparatus or transforming something, has no basis in statute, and questionable case law heritage. As dissenting Judge Newman observed:

The breadth of Section 101 and its predecessor provisions reflects the legislative intention to accommodate not only known fields of creativity, but also the unknown future. The Court has consistently refrained from imposing unwarranted restrictions on statutory eligibility, and for computer-implemented processes the Court has explicitly rejected the direction now taken.

Full post as published by The Patent Prospector on November 02, 2008 (boomark / email).