the property of persons purchasing shares of State-lottery tickets.”), cited in Bennet
Woodcroft, Alphabetical Index of Patentees of Inventions 383, 410 (U.S. ed. 1969).
Other English process patents from the several decades following 1793 can aptly be
described as “business methods,” although not performed with the aid of computers.
E.g., No. 10,367 to George Robert D’Harcourt (Oct. 29, 1844) (“Ascertaining and
checking the number of checks or tickets which have been used and marked, applicable
for railway officers.”).
While most patents of an earlier era reflect the dominant mechanical and
chemical technologies of that era, modern processes reflect the dramatic advances in
telecommunications and computing that have occurred since the time of George III.
See USPTO White Paper, Automated Financial or Management Data Processing
Methods (Business Methods) 4 (2000), available at
http://www.uspto.gov/web/menu/busmethp/whitepaper.pdf (hereinafter USPTO White
Paper) (“The full arrival of electricity as a component in business data processing
system[s] was a watershed event.”). It is apparent that economic, or “business
method,” or “human activity” patents were neither explicitly nor implicitly foreclosed from
access to the English patent system.
Evolution of process patents in the United States
The United States’ history of patenting establishes the same point. The PTO has
located various patents predating modern computer usages that can be described as
financial or business methods. The USPTO White Paper at 3-4 and appendix A
describes the history of financial apparatus and method patents dating back to 1799,
including patents on bank notes, bills of credit, bills of exchange, check blanks,
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