To protect against pre-empting future innovation, some basic discoveries, no matter now useful, new, and nonobvious, have long been categorically excluded as “ineligible” for patenting in the United States: laws of nature, pure natural phenomena, and abstract ideas such as mathematical formulas. However, which ideas are too “abstract” to be eligible? Patents granted on inventions like methods of saving money on taxes have been widely criticized as bad law and bad policy. But what about other business methods? Database designs? Blockchain techniques?

In 2013 the Supreme Court stepped into the debate. And in Alice Corporation v. CLS Bank International, 573 U.S. 208, it held that ineligible “abstract ideas” include any inventions that form a “building block of the modern economy,” or “fundamental economic practice,” or similar concepts. Furthermore, the Court announced, only if such ideas are joined to an “inventive concept”—a limitation “sufficient to transform the claimed abstract idea into a patent-eligible application”—are they eligible even to be considered for patenting.