Piano roll blues

[3] In dissenting from that judgment on the grounds that the Supreme Court in Benson did not limit the principle to method claims, Judge Rich spoke of "the legal doctrine that a new program makes an old general purpose digital computer into a new and different machine."

The argument appeared again two decades later in the majority opinion in In re Alappat,[4] and in his dissenting opinion in that case Chief Judge Archer discussed the figure of speech extensively, concluding: Yet a player piano playing Chopin's scales does not become a "new machine" when it spins a roll to play Brahms' lullaby.

[5]Despite a strong indication in the Supreme Court's Gottschalk v. Benson opinion that computer implementation of an otherwise patent-ineligible abstract idea (in that case a mathematical algorithm) was insufficient to transform the idea into patent-eligible subject matter, the Federal Circuit continued sporadically to assert the piano roll blues argument.

[9] The expression apparently derives from a song popular in the 1950s—"The Old Piano Roll Blues" by Cy Coben[10] — in the style of a Scott Joplin rag.

As Judge Archer points out in his Alappat dissent, there is also an allusion to the decision of the Supreme Court in White-Smith v. Apollo, concerning copyright protection for piano rolls.