Bilski Patent Case: An Unpatented Business Scenario

The United States’ Supreme Court came up with a long awaited decision on a Bilski v. Kappos patent case that could have changed the ways in which the software patents are granted. “Ultimately, little changed, except that the Court’s decision was at odds with 150 years of patent law,” says a legal expert.

The central issue of the case involved the validity of a patent claim for a business method for hedging risks in commodities trading. This case is known to have engaged maximum time than any other patent cases since the 1990s, and thus, finally the Supreme Court has agreed with a lower federal court’s decision that the business method was not patentable.

James Grimmelmann, an associate professor at New York Law School, said that “ Some people claim that all software is an abstract idea, because programming is just a form of mathematics, while others believe that computers that control other machinery, or software that has very specific algorithms is not abstract at all,”. The machine or transformation test would help patent issuers determine what is patentable and what is not.

Richard Field, a past chair of the American Bar Association’s section of science and technology law, said “ The test has always been recognized as how patents are interpreted with very rare exceptions, and both the lower court and dissenting Justices were in line with existing law. The Supreme Court’s majority decision not to use that machine and transformation test, and to instead leave it up to the lower court to define a new test, was an activist position,”.