The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to decide what types of business methods can be patented, a case that legal experts say could have broad implications. “This is the most important patent case in 50 years, in particular because there is so much damage and so much good the court could do,” says George Washington University law professor John F. Duffy. In October, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington significantly reduced the number of processes eligible for patent protection, ruling that only processes “tied to a particular machine or apparatus” or transforming “a particular article into a different state or thing” qualified for protection. In its ruling, the appeals court disavowed statements in earlier cases suggesting that business processes could be patented so long as they yielded useful, concrete, and tangible results. The federal government urged the Supreme Court to not hear the case, adding that the business method at issue was clearly not patentable and that the case did not affect software or more exotic business methods. The courts have relied on the decision of the appeals court since October to deny patent protection to methods of marketing software products, detecting fraud in credit card transactions, and creating real estate investment instruments.
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