No Fireworks at the Supreme Court as Bilski Finally Comes to an End

This article discusses the Bilski v. Kappos decision and the impact it has on the future of patent law, stating that there were no clear winners or losers and that the court decided it is better to leave the lower courts leeway in deciding cases on their particular circumstances than to possibly damage future innovation by unnecessarily limiting the scope of the statute. In Bilksi v. Kappos, the Supreme Court upheld the Federal Circuit’s finding that the claims were unpatentable based on its finding that Bilski was attempting to patent an abstract idea. It also rejected the Federal Circuit’s ‘machine or transformation’ test as the exclusive test for patentable processes. Michael Jakes, partner at Finnegan, argued the case for Bilski at the Supreme Court and stated, “We are disappointed by today’s decision because we believed the Bilski/Warsaw claims should be patentable under the broad language of the Patent Act. We are pleased, however, that the court rejected the Federal Circuit’s very limiting machine-or-transformation test and confirmed that business methods are not excluded from patenting...We will work within the guidance provided by the court to revise the Bilski/Warsaw claims and obtain the patent protection our client has sought for more than 10 years.”