(Gene, this web site badly needs a Comment Preview button)

The Universe must be out of balance. I wholly concur with your comment @ 12.

The BvK opinion is wholly divorced from the actual words of the Bilski claims and wholly divorced from the actual words of 35 USC 101. In other words, the BvK decision is itself a multi-faceted abstraction of an alleged abstraction (by each and every one of the 9 Justices).

You would have thought the 9 Justices were embarrassed enough by the failure of so-called ordinary-creativity and “common sense as well as “market forces” to provide a working Toyota brake pedal system (see their logic re the KSR v. Teleflex accelerator pedal system) that they would know better than to again indulge in a shallow brushing over of a major patent law issue. Luckily for them, the lay public is not tuned in to the peculiarities of esoteric patent law and thus can’t see the emperor marches nakedly in horns and trumpets parade.

Besides, the public has enough to chew on over the Citizens United decision and the declaration by the fab 9 that a corporation has a heart that beats and a larynx that bleeds and therefore deserves “protection” under the 1st Amendment because, obviously, that’s what the Founding Framers were thinking when they inked the original scripture.

There simply is no cognizable analysis of why the claims in question are abstract. There is no process of figuring out the process.

Stevens is correct in stating that the majority lacks this (actually it is all nine justices who lack this and none, including Stevens that did anything helpful about it).

It is too bad that Stevens spent all of his considerable time and energy trying to outlaw business methods (a futile effort given the plainly written law of section 273) based on his ideology and spent no time helping the court figure out a workable test for deducing the proper level of abstract.

Just to clarify what I was talking about because I did not spell it out, 35 USC begins with:

“Whoever invents or discovers any …”

The question centers on the verb phrase, “invents or discovers”. Does that refer to an invented thing (i.e. process) as defined by the written claim taken in whole or does it refer to some other thing; to what the judges deem to be the underlying “true invention” stripped of some crafty words that a skilled patent attorney/agent may have added during preparation or prosecution of the application.

IIRC, the B.v.K. majority says somewhere that they are reading the claim as a whole. However they never address the claims in detail with each being read as a whole. Instead they say each claim “is” an abstraction. That is very vague and can be read in all sorts of ways.

“Clearly you are not a law practitioner –no offense intended; honestly.
If you truly are interested in understanding better, you have an awful plenitude to learn and as they say, Rome was not built in a single day.”

Thank you for your reply, and I have read over some parts of the Law on this matter the best I can understand it. I try not to go “too heavy” with talking about it, because I’m not a law practitioner as I have stated a number of times… no offense intended or taken; honestly !

The idea to make my last post here you reply to, came from your clear point about “true invention”.

Clearly you are not a law practitioner –no offense intended; honestly.
If you truly are interested in understanding better, you have an awful plenitude to learn and as they say, Rome was not built in a single day.

The short answer is that the B.v.K case is strictly a section 101 issue and not a 102, 103 or 112 issue.

To learn more you should Google (and wiki) 35 USC 102, 35 USC 103, 35 USC 112 an US Patent Law.

God will learning

-step back-
I am of course hoping that you caught my sense of sarcasm within the electron stream when I put “true invention” in quotes. Personally I do not believe such an approach is viable if we are going to be a nation of laws rather than of men and their whims. Who is going to say what constitutes the “true invention” and how are they methodically and objectively going to do so? It’s nonsense.

Just wish to take from here, not change context or meaning:

For many years the PTO relied upon for evidence of prior – existing art, only that within PTO
walls. And examinations of applications produced a result, another more serious problem;
it fuels patent litigation today.

The basis of that litigation points to how faulty the system has become. Some patent application
is granted a patent because no prior – existing art challenge to it could be found within PTO walls.
This very approach, creates without intent, a “blind-spot” for everyone the patent could potentially impact.

Without some knowledge, of knowledge existing in many forms beyond the PTO, patents have been
and continue to be granted in what is my conclusion – opinion; a closed world of its own.

For some reason I have the idea the SCOTUS understands this better then I do, without them pointing
to a target. It is this understanding that I see within it, that great care must be taken
going forward from Bilski.

Any Law(s) passed re of Bilski, that guide the direction back-over the SCOTUS with just another case
of the same anytime soon, that was Bilski – or more; the Court of the remaining seven / eight,
I would guess, aren’t going to be nice! I could see software patents being in grave danger !.

The patent world, my opinion, will not prevent the return to the SCOTUS, taking what has been written
as the fall-out of Bilski. I will guess that this matter will be before the Court again inside the next
two years with a result that will end software patents… if not more.

What is confusing about the SCt BvK majority opinion is they say they are reading the claim as a whole and yet they don’t. They say one thing and do another.

I am of course hoping that you caught my sense of sarcasm within the electron stream when I put “true invention” in quotes. Personally I do not believe such an approach is viable if we are going to be a nation of laws rather than of men and their whims. Who is going to say what constitutes the “true invention” and how are they methodically and objectively going to do so? It’s nonsense.

If you ask me personally, “computation” always involves transformation. Energy is always going to be converted/ transformed into high entropy waste heat during performance of the computation.

Of course, if you talk to an English or Poli Sci trained judge, they are not going to grok that kind of stuff. Thermodynamics is outside their world model.

If you yourself are the medical care recipient (the patient) and the data that is being massaged by the “computer” so as to arrive at your diagnosis is of a life or death kind, you are not going to be thinking that the output “data” (diagnosis) is mere “abstraction”. It’s going to be all too real and consequential for you (and for your doctor).

It is only the ivory tower judges sitting comfortably on their philosopher stone thrones and puffing on their existential pipes (pipes which are not pipes) who can see the “abstraction” of it all being cast as a shadow on the wall of their Plato’s cave.