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Page Number: 52

32 

BILSKI v. KAPPOS 

STEVENS, J., concurring in judgment 

that piece of legislative history to mean that any series of 
steps is a patentable process.  Indeed, if that were so, then 
our many opinions analyzing what is a patentable process 
were simply wastes of pages in the U. S. Reports.  And to 
accept that errant piece of legislative history as widening 
the  scope  of  the  patent  law  would  contradict  other  evi-
dence in the congressional record, as well as our presump-
tion  that  the  1952  Act  merely  codified  the  meaning  of 
“process”  and  did  not  expand  it,  see  Diehr,  450  U. S.,  at 
184. 

Taken  in  context,  it  is  apparent  that  the  quoted  lan-
guage has a far less expansive meaning.  The full sentence 
in  the  Committee  Reports  reads:  “A  person  may  have
‘invented’ a machine or a manufacture, which may include 
anything under the sun that is made by man, but it is not 
necessarily patentable under section 101 unless the condi-
tions of [this] title are fulfilled.”  S.  Rep. 1979, at 5; H. R. 
Rep.  1923,  at  6.    Viewed  as  a  whole,  it  seems  clear  that 
this  language  does  not  purport  to  explain  that  “anything 
under  the  sun”  is  patentable.  Indeed,  the  language  may 
be understood to state the exact opposite: that “[a] person
may have ‘invented’ . . . anything under the sun,” but that 
thing  “is  not  necessarily  patentable  under  section  101.”
Thus,  even  in  the  Chakrabarty  opinion,  which  relied  on 
this  quote,  we  cautioned  that  the  1952  Reports  did  not 
“suggest that §101 has no limits or that it embraces every 
discovery.” 447 U. S., at 309. 

Moreover,  even  if  the  language  in  the  Committee  Re-
ports was meant to flesh out the meaning of any portion of 
§101, it did not purport to define the term “process.”  The 
language refers only to “manufacture[s]” and “machine[s],” 
tangible objects “made by man.”  It does not reference the 
“process” category of subject matter (nor could a process be
comfortably described as something “made by man”).  The 
language  may  also  be  understood  merely  as  defining  the 
term  “invents”  in  §101.    As  Judge  Dyk  explained  in  his