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10 

BILSKI v. KAPPOS 

Opinion of the Court 

tion,  let  alone  holding  that  any  of  the  above-mentioned 
technologies  from  the  Information  Age  should  or  should
not receive patent protection.  This Age puts the possibil-
ity  of  innovation  in  the  hands  of  more  people  and  raises
new difficulties for the patent law.  With ever more people 
trying to innovate and thus seeking patent protections for
their inventions, the patent law faces a great challenge in
striking the balance between protecting inventors and not 
granting  monopolies  over  procedures  that  others  would 
discover  by  independent,  creative  application  of  general
principles.  Nothing in this opinion should be read to take
a position on where that balance ought to be struck. 

C 
1 
Section  101  similarly  precludes  the  broad  contention
that  the  term  “process”  categorically  excludes  business
methods.  The  term  “method,”  which  is  within  §100(b)’s
definition  of  “process,”  at  least  as  a  textual  matter  and
before  consulting  other  limitations  in  the  Patent  Act  and 
this  Court’s  precedents,  may  include  at  least  some  meth-
ods  of  doing  business.  See,  e.g.,  Webster’s  New  Interna-
tional Dictionary 1548 (2d ed. 1954) (defining “method” as
“[a]n  orderly  procedure  or  process  . . .  regular  way  or 
manner of doing anything; hence, a set form of procedure
adopted  in  investigation  or  instruction”).    The  Court  is 
unaware  of  any  argument  that  the  “ ‘ordinary,  contempo-
rary, common meaning,’ ” Diehr, supra, at 182, of “method” 
excludes business methods.  Nor is it clear how far a pro-
hibition  on  business  method  patents  would  reach,  and 
whether  it  would  exclude  technologies  for  conducting  a 
business  more  efficiently.    See,  e.g.,  Hall,  Business  and 
Financial  Method  Patents,  Innovation,  and  Policy,  56 
Scottish J. Pol. Econ. 443, 445 (2009)  (“There is no precise 
definition of . . .  business method patents”).

The  argument  that  business  methods  are  categorically