arbitration was required by the language of the document, a dispute regarding the
document was arbitrated, and a binding decision resulted from the arbitration.
Comiskey, 499 F.3d at 1368-69. We held the broadest process claims unpatentable
under § 101 because "these claims do not require a machine, and these claims
evidently do not describe a process of manufacture or a process for the alteration of a
composition of matter." Id. at 1379. We concluded that the claims were instead drawn
to the "mental process" of arbitrating disputes, and that claims to such an "application of
[only] human intelligence to the solution of practical problems" is no more than a claim
to a fundamental principle. Id. at 1377-79 (quoting Benson, 409 U.S. at 67 ("[M]ental
processes, and abstract intellectual concepts are not patentable, as they are the basic
tools of scientific and technological work.")).
Just as the Comiskey claims as a whole were directed to the mental process of
arbitrating a dispute to decide its resolution, the claimed process here as a whole is
directed to the mental and mathematical process of identifying transactions that would
hedge risk. The fact that the claim requires the identified transactions actually to be
made does no more to alter the character of the claim as a whole than the fact that the
claims in Comiskey required a decision to actually be rendered in the arbitration—i.e., in
neither case do the claims require the use of any particular machine or achieve any
eligible transformation.
We have in fact consistently rejected claims like those in the present appeal and
in Comiskey. For example, in Meyer, the applicant sought to patent a method of
diagnosing the location of a malfunction in an unspecified multi-component system that
assigned a numerical value, a "factor," to each component and updated that value
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