While Alice v. CLS Bank has confirmed that patent claims require a further \u201cinventive concept\u201d beyond an underlying abstract idea or law of nature for patent-eligibility, there is little agreement on what defines either an \u201cabstract idea\u201d or an \u201cinventive concept.\u201d Resolving this uncertainty is critical to determining the patent-eligibility of software claims beyond the simple \u201cdo it on a computer\u201d type invalidated in Alice. This Article argues that the rationale and two-step analysis articulated in Mayo and Alice represents a fundamental reorientation of the Supreme Court\u2019s jurisprudence, effectively superseding the Court\u2019s earlier \u00a7 101 cases. Based on the structure of the Mayo\/Alice test, this Article argues for a differentiated framework of \u201cinventive concept,\u201d requiring inventive application for most abstract ideas, but only non-generic application for most laws of nature. Under this framework, two key classes of subject matter remain patent-eligible: (1) claims that do more than reveal the results of an underlying law of nature, and (2) claims to specific and inventive information-processing techniques.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
While Alice v. CLS Bank has confirmed that patent claims require a further \u201cinventive concept\u201d beyond an underlying abstract idea or law of nature for patent-eligibility, there is little agreement on what defines either an \u201cabstract idea\u201d or an \u201cinventive concept.\u201d Resolving this uncertainty is critical to determining the patent-eligibility of software claims beyond the …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,62,67],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3523"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3523"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3523\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7324,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3523\/revisions\/7324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}