to invention patents on advances in trade itself, because trade monopolies were
odious.”).
There is nothing in the early patent statutes to indicate that Congress intended
business methods to constitute patentable subject matter. See Patent Act of 1790 § 4,
1 Stat. 109, 111 (1790); Patent Act of 1793 § 1, 1 Stat. 318, 319 (1793); Pollack, supra
at 106 (“[I]f any nation was ripe for invention patents on business methods, it was the
newly freed colonies of British North America. . . . [H]owever, no business method
patents seem to have been granted.”). As early as 1869, the Commissioner of Patents
said that “[i]t is contrary . . . to the spirit of the law, as construed by the office for many
years, to grant patents for methods of book-keeping,” Ex parte Abraham, 1869 Dec.
Comm'r Pat. 59, 59 (1869), and by 1893 the courts had concluded that “a method of
transacting common business . . . does not seem to be patentable as an art,” United
States Credit Sys. Co. v. Am. Credit Indem. Co., 53 F. 818, 819 (C.C.S.D.N.Y. 1893),
.
By 1952, when Congress enacted the
current Patent Act, it was widely acknowledged that methods of doing business were
ineligible for patent protection. See, e.g., Loew’s Drive-In Theatres, Inc. v. Park-In
Theatres, Inc., 174 F.2d 547, 552 (1st Cir. 1949) (“[A] system for the transaction of
business . . . however novel, useful, or commercially successful is not patentable apart
from the means for making the system practically useful, or carrying it out.”); In re
Patton, 127 F.2d 324 (CCPA 1942) (noting that “a system of transacting business, apart
(“A system of transacting business
disconnected from the means for carrying out the system is not, within the most liberal
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