US Supreme Court to hear landmark Bilski case

摘要

The US Supreme Court has said that it will hear a case involving business-method patents for the first time in 28 years, a decision which may have repercussions for one of the most controversial areas of IP law. The justices agreed to review a ruling by the Court of Appeals which denied inventors Bernard Bilski and Rand Warsaw a patent for their computerised method for using weather data to predict commodities prices and energy costs. In that case, the court had significandy narrowed the criteria for method patents protection, ruling that only those 'tied to a particular machine or apparatus' or transforming 'a particular article into a different state or thing' qualified.