308. The Court referred to the legislative intent to include within the scope of Section
101 “anything under the sun that is made by man,” id. at 309 (citing S. Rep. 82-1979, at
5; H.R. Rep. 82-1923, at 6 (1952)), and stated that the unforeseeable future should not
be inhibited by judicial restriction of the “broad general language” of Section 101:
A rule that unanticipated inventions are without protection would conflict
with the core concept of the patent law that anticipation undermines
patentability. Mr. Justice Douglas reminded that the inventions most
benefiting mankind are those that push back the frontiers of chemistry,
physics, and the like. Congress employed broad general language in
drafting §101 precisely because such inventions are often unforeseeable.
Id. at 315-16 (citations and internal quotation marks omitted). The Court emphasized
that its precedents did not alter this understanding of Section 101’s breadth, stating that
“Flook did not announce a new principle that inventions in areas not contemplated by
Congress when the patent laws were enacted are unpatentable per se.” Id. at 315.
Whether the applications of physics and chemistry that are manifested in
advances in computer hardware and software were more or less foreseeable than the
advances in biology and biotechnology is debatable, but it is not debatable that these
fields of endeavor have become primary contributors to today’s economy and culture,
as well as offering an untold potential for future advances. My colleagues offer no
reason now to adopt a policy of exclusion of the unknown future from the subject matter
now embraced in Section 101.
Soon after Chakrabarty was decided, the Court returned to patentability issues
arising from computer capabilities:
In Diamond v. Diehr the Court directly held that computer-implemented processes
are included in Section 101
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