Business method patent
[2] On January 7, 1791, the French revolutionary National Constituent Assembly passed a patent law that stated that "Any new discovery or invention, in all types of industry, is owned by its author".
In Britain, a patent was issued in 1778 to John Knox for a "[p]lan for assurances on lives of persons from 10 to 80 years of age".
[5] The first financial patent was granted on March 19, 1799, to Jacob Perkins of Massachusetts for an invention for "Detecting Counterfeit Notes".
All details of Perkins' invention, which presumably was a device or process in the printing art, were lost in the great Patent Office fire of 1836.
The first financial patent for which any detailed written description survives was to a printing method entitled "A Mode of Preventing Counterfeiting" granted to John Kneass on April 28, 1815.
1950), in which the court held that a patent on "blind testing" whiskey blends for consumer preferences would be "a serious restraint upon the advance of science and industry" and therefore should be refused.
[8][9] The subsequent allowance of patents on computer-implemented methods for doing business was challenged in the 1998 State Street Bank v. Signature Financial Group, (47 USPQ 2d 1596 (CAFC 1998)).
The court affirmed the position of the USPTO and rejected the theory that a "method of doing business" was excluded subject matter.
The USPTO continued to require, however, that business method inventions must apply, involve, use or advance the "technological arts" in order to be patentable.
This was based on an unpublished decision of the U.S. Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences, Ex parte Bowman, 61 USPQ2d 1665, 1671 (Bd Pat.
In October 2005 the USPTO's own administrative judges overturned this position in a majority decision of the board in Ex parte Lundgren, Appeal No.
In light of Ex parte Lundgren, the USPTO has issued interim guidelines for patent examiners to determine if a given claimed invention meets the statutory requirements of being a process, manufacture, composition of matter or machine (35 USC 101).
In 2006, Justice Kennedy of the US Supreme Court cast aspersions on business method patents when he commented that some of them were of "potential vagueness and suspect validity".
With respect to the facts of the case before it, the Supreme Court affirmed the Federal Circuit's en banc rejection of an application for a patent on a method of stabilizing cost inputs in the energy industry by hedging price rises against decreases.
The Court held that the investment strategy set forth in the application was an "abstract idea", making it ineligible under that exception to the general subject-matter areas listed in the Patent Act.
Processes involving transformation of abstract financial data, such as that claimed in machine format in State Street, are probably patent ineligible.
[17] The majority opinion in In re Bilski refused to hold business methods categorically ineligible on any ground.
[20] Several years later, in Alice v. CLS Bank, the Supreme Court readdressed the patent eligibility of a business method.
The World Trade Organization's Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) does not specifically address business method patents.
[25] According to Brazilian Patent Law 9279, "commercial, accounting, financial, educational, advertising, raffling, and inspection schemes, plans, principles or methods" are not considered to be inventions or Utility Models.
[30] In the 8th edition of the International Patent Classification (IPC), which entered into force on January 1, 2006, a special subclass has been created for business methods: "G06Q" (Data processing systems or methods, specially adapted for administrative, commercial, financial, managerial, supervisory or forecasting purposes).
Class 705 includes sub-categories for industries such as health care, insurance, electronic shopping, inventory management, accounting, and finance.
