Opinion ID: 209543
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 10

Heading: Evolution of process patents in the United States

Text: The United States' history of patenting establishes the same point. The PTO has located various patents predating modern computer usages that can be described as financial or business methods. The USPTO White Paper at 3-4 and appendix A describes the history of financial apparatus and method patents dating back to 1799, including patents on bank notes, bills of credit, bills of exchange, check blanks, detecting and preventing counterfeiting, coin counting, interest calculation tables, and lotteries, all within the first fifty years of the United States patent system. It is a distortion of these patents to describe the processes as tied to another statutory categoryÔÇöthat is, paper and pencil. Concurring op. at 974-75 & n. 18. Replacement of paper with a computer screen, and pencil with electrons, does not untie the process. Fairly considered, the many older financial and business-oriented patents that the PTO and many of the amici have identified are of the same type as the Bilski claims; they were surely not rendered patent-eligible solely because they used paper to instantiate the financial strategies and transactions that comprised their contribution. I do not disagree with the general suggestion that statutes intended to codify the existing common law are to be interpreted in light of then-contemporary practice, including, if relevant, the English cases. See concurring op. at 972-73. However, the court must be scrupulous in assessing the relevance of decisions that were formulated on particularized facts involving the technology of the period. The United States Supreme Court has never held that process inventions suffered a second-class status under our statutes, achieving patent eligibility only derivatively through an explicit tie to another statutory category. The Court has repeatedly disparaged efforts to read in restrictions not based on statutory language. See Diehr, 450 U.S. at 182, 101 S.Ct. 1048; Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. at 308, 100 S.Ct. 2204. Yet second-class status is today engrafted on process inventions. There is plainly no basis for such restriction, which is a direct path to the gloomy thought that concerned Senator O.H. Platt in his Remarks in Congress at the Centennial Proceedings of the United States Patent System: For one, I cannot entertain the gloomy thought that we have come to that century in the world's life in which new and grander achievements are impossible.. . . Invention is a prolific mother; every inventive triumph stimulates new effort. Man never is and never will be content with success, and the great secrets of nature are as yet largely undiscovered. Invention and Advancement (1891), reprinted in United States Bicentennial Commemorative Edition of Proceedings and Addresses: Celebration of the Beginning of the Second Century of the American Patent System 75-76 (1990). In sum, history does not support the retrogression sponsored by the concurrence.