One of the first post-Bilski decisions by a Federal Circuit panel, Ferguson confirms the breadth of the en banc Bilski opinion's rejection of the core holdings in State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group, Inc.[2] Ferguson was brought as a test case[3] by patent attorney Scott Harris in what proved to be an unsuccessful effort to compel the PTO to accept as patent-eligible subject matter a "paradigm," which is a pattern for a business organization.

Harris also unsuccessfully sought to persuade the PTO and Federal Circuit to adopt as a test of patent-eligibility ---- "Does the claimed subject matter require that the product or process has more than a scintilla of interaction with the real world in a specific way?"

§ 101 for at least this reason.The method claims fell within the dictionary concept of a 'process," but were excluded from the statutory meaning of that term by the decision in Bilski.

But as this court stated in Bilski, "[p]urported transformations or manipulations simply of public or private legal obligations or relationships, business risks, or other such abstractions cannot meet the test because they are not physical objects or substances, and they are not representative of physical objects or substances.Therefore, Ferguson's method does not satisfy the machine-or-transformation test.

Because they preceded Bilski, the Board's opinion and the parties' briefs and arguments extensively discussed the "useful, concrete, and tangible" test.

The court then turned to attorney Harris's proposed new test for patent-eligibility — "Does the claimed subject matter require that the product or process has more than a scintilla of interaction with the real world in a specific way?"

The court responded that the paradigm was just a business model for organizing a marketing company; it was not a machine because it was not a combination of physical parts.