32 J.P.O.S. 83, 86 (1950) (“By the year 1787 it was being recognized even in Great
Britain that the phrase ‘new manufactures’ was an unduly limited object for a patent
system, since it seems to exclude new processes. . . . [This question was] resolved in
the United States Constitution by broadening the field from ‘new manufactures’ to
‘useful arts’ . . . .”).
In interpreting a statute, it is the language selected by Congress that occupies
center stage: “[O]ur obligation is to take statutes as we find them, guided, if ambiguity
appears, by the legislative history and statutory purpose.” Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. at
315. The Court has “perceive[d] no ambiguity” in Section 101, leaving no need for
foreign assistance. Id. The legislative choice to afford the patent system “wide scope,”
id. at 308, including “process” inventions, evolved in the United States independent of
later developments of the common law in England.
The concurrence concludes that the Statute of Monopolies foreclosed the future
patenting of anything that the concurrence calls a “business method”—the term is not
defined—whether or not the method is new, inventive, and useful. But the Statute of
Monopolies only foreclosed “odious” monopolies, illustrated by historical reports that
Queen Elizabeth had granted monopolies on salt, ale, saltpeter, white soap, dredging
machines, playing cards, and rape seed oil, and on processes and services such as
Spanish leather-making, mining of various metals and ores, dying and dressing cloth,
and iron tempering. See Walterscheid, Early Evolution (Part 2), 76 J.P.T.O.S. at 854
n.14; Klitzke, Historical Background of the English Patent Law, 41 J.P.O.S. at 634-35.
These and other grants, many of which were implemented by Letters Patent, were the
“odious monopolies” that were rendered illegal. They included several classes of known
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