Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/09pdf/08-964.pdf
Page Number: 19.0

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

15 

Opinion of the Court 

the need to consider the invention as a whole, rather than 
“dissect[ing]  the  claims  into  old  and  new  elements  and 
then . . . ignor[ing] the presence of the old elements in the
analysis.”  Id.,  at  188.  Finally,  the  Court  concluded  that 
because  the  claim  was  not  “an  attempt  to  patent  a
mathematical  formula,  but  rather  [was]  an  industrial
process  for  the  molding  of  rubber  products,”  it  fell  within
§101’s patentable subject matter.  Id., at 192–193. 

In  light  of  these  precedents,  it  is  clear  that  petitioners’ 
application is not a patentable “process.”  Claims 1 and 4 
in  petitioners’  application  explain  the  basic  concept  of 
hedging,  or  protecting  against  risk:  “Hedging  is  a  funda-
mental  economic  practice  long  prevalent  in  our  system  of 
commerce  and  taught  in  any  introductory  finance  class.” 
545  F. 3d,  at  1013  (Rader,  J.,  dissenting);  see,  e.g.,  D. 
Chorafas,  Introduction  to  Derivative  Financial  Instru-
ments  75–94  (2008);  C.  Stickney,  R.  Weil,  K.  Schipper,  & 
J. Francis, Financial Accounting: An Introduction to Con-
cepts,  Methods,  and  Uses  581–582  (13th  ed.  2010);  S.
Ross,  R.  Westerfield,  &  B.  Jordan,  Fundamentals  of  Cor-
porate  Finance  743–744  (8th  ed.  2008).  The  concept  of
hedging, described in claim 1 and reduced to a mathemati-
cal  formula  in  claim  4,  is  an  unpatentable  abstract  idea,
just  like  the  algorithms  at  issue  in  Benson  and  Flook. 
Allowing  petitioners  to  patent  risk  hedging  would  pre-
empt  use  of  this  approach  in  all  fields,  and  would  effec-
tively grant a monopoly over an abstract idea. 

Petitioners’ remaining claims are broad examples of how 
hedging  can  be  used  in  commodities  and  energy  markets. 
Flook  established  that  limiting  an  abstract  idea  to  one 
field  of  use  or  adding  token  postsolution  components  did 
not make the concept patentable.  That is exactly what the 
remaining  claims  in  petitioners’  application  do.  These 
claims  attempt  to  patent  the  use  of  the  abstract  idea  of
hedging  risk  in  the  energy  market  and  then  instruct  the