Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/09pdf/08-964.pdf
Page Number: 9.0

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

5 

Opinion of the Court 

Jefferson 75–76 (H. Washington ed. 1871)). 

The Court’s precedents provide three specific exceptions 
to  §101’s  broad  patent-eligibility  principles:  “laws  of  na-
ture,  physical  phenomena,  and  abstract  ideas.”    Chakra-
barty,  supra,  at  309.  While  these  exceptions  are  not  re-
quired  by  the  statutory  text,  they  are  consistent  with  the
notion that a patentable process must be “new and useful.”
And, in any case, these exceptions have defined the reach
of  the  statute  as  a  matter  of  statutory  stare  decisis  going
back 150 years.  See Le Roy v. Tatham, 14 How. 156, 174– 
175 (1853).  The concepts covered by these exceptions are
“part of the storehouse of knowledge of all men . . . free to
all men and reserved exclusively to none.”  Funk Brothers 
Seed Co. v. Kalo Inoculant Co., 333 U. S. 127, 130 (1948).

The  §101  patent-eligibility  inquiry  is  only  a  threshold 
test.  Even if an invention qualifies as a process, machine,
manufacture, or composition of matter, in order to receive
the  Patent  Act’s  protection  the  claimed  invention  must 
also satisfy “the conditions and requirements of this title.”
§101.  Those  requirements  include  that  the  invention  be
novel,  see  §102,  nonobvious,  see  §103,  and  fully  and  par-
ticularly described, see §112. 

The  present  case  involves  an  invention  that  is  claimed
to be a “process” under §101.  Section 100(b) defines “proc-
ess” as: 

“process,  art  or  method,  and  includes  a  new  use  of  a
known process, machine, manufacture, composition of
matter, or material.” 

The Court first considers two proposed categorical limita-
tions  on  “process”  patents  under  §101  that  would,  if 
adopted,  bar  petitioners’  application  in  the  present  case: 
the  machine-or-transformation  test  and  the  categorical 
exclusion of business method patents.