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Intellectual Property Law

University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School

Series

Patentable Subject Matter

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Law

Life After Bilski, Mark A. Lemley, Michael Risch, Ted Sichelman, R. Polk Wagner Jan 2011

Life After Bilski, Mark A. Lemley, Michael Risch, Ted Sichelman, R. Polk Wagner

All Faculty Scholarship

In Bilski v. Kappos, the Supreme Court declined calls to categorically exclude business methods—or any technology—from the patent law. It also rejected as the sole test of subject matter eligibility the Federal Circuit’s deeply-flawed machine-or-transformation test, under which no process is patentable unless it is tied to a particular machine or transforms an article to another state or thing. Subsequent developments threaten to undo that holding, however. Relying on the Court’s description of the Federal Circuit test as a “useful and important clue,” the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, patent litigants, and district courts have all continued to rely on …


Ip And Antitrust: Reformation And Harm, Christina Bohannan, Herbert J. Hovenkamp Jan 2010

Ip And Antitrust: Reformation And Harm, Christina Bohannan, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Antitrust and intellectual property law both seek to improve economic welfare by facilitating competition and investment in innovation. At various times both antitrust and IP law have wandered off this course and have become more driven by special interests. Today, antitrust and IP are on very different roads to reform. Antitrust reform began in the late 1970s with a series of Supreme Court decisions that linked the plaintiff’s harm and right to obtain a remedy to the competition - furthering goals of antitrust policy. Today, patent law has begun its own reform journey, but it is in a much earlier …