Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who wrote the 16-page majority opinion, was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. in saying that the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit was wrong to declare in 2008 that the "machine or transformation" test was the only appropriate test for patenting a process.
The Intellectual Property Law Association urges the court to reject the lower court's explicit use of a "machine or transformation test," however, which requires patents to involve a process with some kind of physical change.
The court knocked down a test for patentability used by the lower court a requirement that a process be linked to a machine or "transformation" of material to be viable.
It even partially undercut its own "machine and transformation" rule, before reaffirming it, sort of, in an another attached opinion.
They are also mostly contrary to the later interpretive overlay of passing the "machine or transformation" test, in which you might have been able to patent a new machine but you couldn't patent an idea or algorithm, such as how you shopped for the machine.
High level synthesis, implemented in the experimental EDA tool Abelite is based on Algorithmic State machine (ASM) transformations (composition, minimization, extraction, etc)., special algorithms for Data Path and Control Unit design and a very fast optimizing synthesis of FSM and combinational circuits with hardly any constraints on the number of inputs, outputs and states.
Failing on both counts, the inventors took their case to the Supreme Court, which has been pondering for the past few months whether the "machine-or-transformation" test is an appropriate standard.
"We are pleased," he continued, with the broader message of the case -- that business methods could be patented, and that process patents would not be limited to the machine-or-transformation test.
Relying heavily on 1970s-era Supreme Court decisions that established the "machine-or-transformation test," the Chief Judge, Paul Michel wrote for a nine-judge majority Thursday that Mr. Bilski's patent application did not meet an older definition of "process" under patent law.
That all changed in 2008, however, when the Federal Circuit displaced this "tangible result" standard with the "machine-or-transformation test" (call it "MoT" for the sake of brevity).
