The International Law of Business Method Patents

In its 1998 decision in State Street Bank and Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group, Inc., the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (which now hears all patent appeals in this country) addressed "the judicially-created, so-called 'business method' exception to statutory subject matter" (149 F. 3d 1368, 1375 [Fed. Cir. 1998], cert. denied, 525 U.S. 1093 [1999]). Throughout most of the history of American patent law, the courts and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) had usually-but not uniformly-denied patents to inventions that amounted to nothing more than methods for doing business. In State Street, the Federal Circuit repudiated this long-standing practice in terms that could not have been blunter: "We take this opportunity to lay this ill-conceived exception to rest. . . . Since the 1952 Patent Act, business methods have been, and should have been, subject to the same legal requirements for patentability as applied to any other process or method" (State Street, 1375).