The public has relied on the rulings of this court and of the Supreme Court
The decisions in Alappat and State Street Bank confirmed the patent eligibility of
many evolving areas of commerce, as inventors and investors explored new
technological capabilities. The public and the economy have experienced extraordinary
advances in information-based and computer-managed processes, supported by an
enlarging patent base. The PTO reports that in Class 705, the examination
classification associated with “business methods” and most likely to receive inventions
that may not use machinery or transform physical matter, there were almost 10,000
patent applications filed in FY 2006 alone, and over 40,000 applications filed since FY
98 when State Street Bank was decided. See Wynn W. Coggins, USPTO, Update on
Business Methods for the Business Methods Partnership Meeting 6 (2007) (hereinafter
“PTO Report”), available at http://www.uspto.gov/web/menu/pbmethod/partnership.pps.
An amicus in the present case reports that over 15,000 patents classified in Class 705
have issued. See Br. of Amicus Curiae Accenture, at 22 n.20.
The industries
identified with information-based and data-handling processes, as several amici curiae
explain and illustrate, include fields as diverse as banking and finance, insurance, data
processing, industrial engineering, and medicine.
Stable law, on which industry can rely, is a foundation of commercial advance
into new products and processes. Inventiveness in the computer and information
services fields has placed the United States in a position of technological and
commercial preeminence. The information technology industry is reported to be “the
4
The PTO recognizes that patents on “business methods” have been
eligible subject matter for two centuries. See USPTO White Paper 2 (“Financial patents
in the paper-based technologies have been granted continuously for over two hundred
years.”).
2007-1130
30