The past two months have seen no fewer than six Supreme Court intellectual property decisions. Three of them are unanimous patent opinions issued in June that limit the rights or remedies of patent holders.
Perhaps the most significant of the three patent decisions is Alice Corp. Pty. v. CLS Bank Int’l, 2014 WL 2765283 (June 19, 2014), holding that business method patents claiming a computer-implemented scheme for mitigating settlement risk in financial transactions were not patent-eligible under §101 of the Patent Act. Applying the reasoning of Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, 132 S.Ct. 1289 (2012), the CLS Bank court held that the patents covered a patent-ineligible abstract idea, and that the use of a generic computer to implement the method—a common technique used by patent drafters—did not transform that abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention. A concurrence by three Justices (Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg) went even farther, stating the often-expressed view that no business method claims should be patentable under §101.
