While Alice v. CLS Bank has confirmed that patent claims require a further “inventive concept” beyond an underlying abstract idea or law of nature for patent-eligibility, there is little agreement on what defines either an “abstract idea” or an “inventive concept.” Resolving this uncertainty is critical to determining the patent-eligibility of software claims beyond the …
The Alice Court’s characterization of computer programming has effectively repudiated, inter alia, the doctrine that programming a general-purpose computer creates a patent-eligible “new machine.” This Article revisits In re Bernhart, the first holding based on the “new machine” principle, concluding that the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals committed a category mistake in conducting its …
