Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/09pdf/08-964.pdf
Page Number: 11.0

Cite as:  561 U. S. ____ (2010) 

7 

Opinion of the Court 

test for what constitutes a “process” (as opposed to just an
important  and  useful  clue)  violates  these  statutory  inter-
pretation  principles.  Section  100(b)  provides  that  “[t]he
term ‘process’ means process, art or method, and includes 
a  new  use  of  a  known  process,  machine,  manufacture, 
composition of matter, or material.”  The Court is unaware 
of  any  “ ‘ordinary,  contemporary,  common  meaning,’ ” 
Diehr, supra, at 182, of the definitional terms “process, art 
or method” that would require these terms to be tied to a 
machine or to transform an article.  Respondent urges the
Court to look to the other patentable categories in §101—
machines,  manufactures,  and  compositions  of  matter—to
confine  the  meaning  of  “process”  to  a  machine  or  trans-
formation,  under  the  doctrine  of  noscitur  a  sociis.  Under 
this canon, “an ambiguous term may be given more precise 
content  by  the  neighboring  words  with  which  it  is  associ-
ated.”  United  States  v.  Stevens,  559  U. S.  ___,  ___  (2010) 
(slip  op.,  at  12)  (internal  quotation  marks  omitted).    This 
canon  is  inapplicable  here,  for  §100(b)  already  explicitly
defines the term “process.”  See Burgess  v. United States, 
553  U. S.  124,  130  (2008)  (“When  a  statute  includes  an 
explicit  definition,  we  must  follow  that  definition”  (inter-
nal quotation marks omitted)).

The  Court  of  Appeals  incorrectly  concluded  that  this
Court has endorsed the machine-or-transformation test as 
the  exclusive  test.  It  is  true  that  Cochrane  v.  Deener,  94 
U. S. 780, 788 (1877), explained that a “process” is “an act, 
or a series of acts, performed upon the subject-matter to be 
transformed  and  reduced  to  a  different  state  or  thing.”
More recent cases, however, have rejected the broad impli-
cations  of  this  dictum;  and,  in  all  events,  later  authority
shows  that  it  was  not  intended  to  be  an  exhaustive  or 
exclusive  test.  Gottschalk  v.  Benson,  409  U. S.  63,  70 
(1972),  noted  that  “[t]ransformation  and  reduction  of  an
article ‘to a different state or thing’ is the clue to the pat-