Opinion ID: 867144
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Parker v. Flook

Text: Six years later, in Parker v. Flook, 437 U.S. 584 (1978), the Supreme Court again considered the patent eligibility of a computerized process—in particular, a method for updating alarm limits for continuously monitored industrial process variables (e.g., temperature or pressure) according to a disclosed mathematical formula. See id. at 585–86. The claim required three steps: measuring the present value of a process variable, using the mathematical formula to calculate a new alarm limit in view of the present value, and adjusting the previous alarm limit to the newly calculated limit. Id.; see also id. at 596–97 (claim 1). A further preamble limitation restricted the claim to processes “comprising the catalytic chemical conversion of hydrocarbons,” id. at 596, so the claim did not cover “every conceivable application of the formula,” id. at 586. Although the claim would not “wholly preempt” the mathematical formula, id. at 589, the Court nonetheless held that the claimed process fell under the abstract ideas exception to patent eligibility. In its analysis, the Court viewed the formula as an abstract principle and stated that the case must “be considered as if the principle or mathematical formula were well known.” Id. at 592. The Court then asked whether, to confer patent eligibility, the claim contained sufficient substance beyond the abstract mathematical formula itself—that is, “some other inventive concept in its application.” Id. at 594; see also id. at 590 (“A competent draftsman could attach some form of post-solution activity to almost any mathematical formula . . . .”). Concluding that the field-of-use, monitoring, adjusting, and computer limitations were trivial or “well known” under such an analysis, the Court held that the 12 CLS BANK INTERNATIONAL v. ALICE CORPORATION claims were not patent eligible: “[I]f a claim is directed essentially to a method of calculating, using a mathematical formula, even if the solution is for a specific purpose, the claimed method is nonstatutory.” Id. at 594–95 (quoting In re Richman, 563 F.2d 1026, 1030 (CCPA 1977)).