New Hope in Challenging Business Method Patents

There’s not much love in legal circles for the so-called “business method” patent, an exclusive intellectual property right over a novel way of doing business. Critics of such patents – think Amazon “One Click” or Priceline’s “name your own price” patents – argue that they clog up the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, lead to excessive litigation and have little connection to real, physical invention.
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Now the patent law community is closely watching one case in particular and speculating that federal judges could invalidate business method patents sometime this year. The case, generally known as re Bilski, involves a method for managing the risk of bad weather to crops by making hedged trades in the commodities markets. The twelve judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit have agreed to hear the case en banc, or in a single joint session in May, and have suggested that they might reconsider the ruling on State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group Inc., which helped to inaugurate the age of business method patents a decade ago.