During the heady dot-com heyday, patent attorney Scott Harris and his buddies set off to patent a far-out sounding “paradigm” for marketing software to customers.

The idea reached the end of the road Friday when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit determined that it’s not worthy of a patent. Citing its recent decision in In Re Bilski, which found that pure business methods aren’t patentable, the court ruled that the “Applicants do no more than provide an abstract idea — a business model for an intangible marketing company.”