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United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
2007-1130 
(Serial No. 08/883,892) 
 
 
 
IN RE BERNARD L. BILSKI  
and RAND A. WARSAW 
 
 
 
Appeal from the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Board of Patent Appeals 
and Interferences. 
 
 
NEWMAN, Circuit Judge, dissenting. 
 
The court today acts en banc to impose a new and far-reaching restriction on the 
kinds of inventions that are eligible to participate in the patent system.  The court 
achieves this result by redefining the word “process” in the patent statute, to exclude all 
processes that do not transform physical matter or that are not performed by machines.  
The court thus excludes many of the kinds of inventions that apply today’s electronic 
and photonic technologies, as well as other processes that handle data and information 
in novel ways.  Such processes have long been patent eligible, and contribute to the 
vigor and variety of today’s Information Age. This exclusion of process inventions is 
contrary to statute, contrary to precedent, and a negation of the constitutional mandate.  
Its impact on the future, as well as on the thousands of patents already granted, is 
unknown. 
This exclusion is imposed at the threshold, before it is determined whether the 
excluded process is new, non-obvious, enabled, described, particularly claimed, etc.; 
that is, before the new process is examined for patentability.  For example, we do not