When we stand back and assess what happened here, a few things become evident: 1. The Court did not have to hear this appeal. It did so under a discretionary g

When we stand back and assess what happened here, a few things become evident: 1. The Court did not have to hear this appeal. It did so under a discretionary grant of certiorari. So the question is, what did it intend to accomplish? Well, since it did not arrive at any new test for assessing whether business methods are patentable, and since it simply affirmed the decision of the Federal Circuit on the merits of Bilski's particular claim, the logical answer is that the Court was very uncomfortable with the Federal Circuit's adoption of the so-called machine-or-transformation test as sole test for whether processes are patentable and it ruled in a way to make it clear that this is not to be an exclusive test. 2. Thus, in spite of the hopes of many that the Court was using this as an opportunity to rein in a wildly out-of-control system of business-method and software patents, the Court was in fact aiming to prevent any form of categorical limitation from being put on what or what does constitute patentable subject matter when it comes to processes. In this sense, the Court's ruling was definitive in rejecting any categorical attempt to limit the scope of such patentable subject matter ("Congress plainly contemplated that the patent laws would be given wide scope"). 3. What this means, for good or for bad, is that the Court is not about to hold any form of broad category (e.g., software patents) as being inherently unpatentable. 4. Ergo, there is no radical answer here for those who hoped the Court would strike down software patents. As noted in this piece, however, the Court definitely rejected the other extreme as well by saying that it was not endorsing the Federal Circuit's 1998 State Street decision that had served to open the floodgates to software patents (by ruling that any process can be patented as long as it leads to a "useful, concrete and tangible result"). 5. The Court also explicitly acknowledged the issues that are troubling so many: "It is important to emphasize that the Court today is not commenting on the patentability of any particular invention, let alone holding that any of the above-mentioned technologies from the Information Age should or should not receive patent protection. This Age puts the possibility of innovation in the hands of more people and raises new difficulties for the patent law. With ever more people trying to innovate and thus seeking patent protections for their inventions, the patent law faces a great challenge in striking a balance between protecting invention and not granting monopolies over procedures that others would discover by independent, creative application of general principles. Nothing in this opinion should be read to take a position on where that balance ought to be struck." 6. I read all this as the Court's way of saying, in effect, "we are not about to wade into this mess and solve a problem that fundamentally belongs to Congress and, thus, under the current statutory scheme, we will guide the lower courts only to the extent of telling them to approach the issues case-by-case while not going to the extreme of trying to limit patentable processes through arbitrary tests that Congress did not authorize and while being sensitive that their rulings in the information age might have the unintended consequence of stifling innovation through the grant of improper monopolies - thus, to be vigilant to use all the tools available under the statutory scheme (e.g., other requirements that patents be novel, nonobvious, and fully and particularly described; that they not constitute abstract ideas, etc.) to prevent the system from getting wildly out of control." 7. Thus, one can say that the Court basically upheld the status quo but with a few twists. I know this is profoundly anticlimactic and disappointing for those who were looking for a comprehensive answer to the problems raised by process patents, but I personally don't think the Court had a lot of choice in being bound ultimately to rule on what Congress meant when it enacted a broadly-worded statute (for a technical analysis of the statute, see my prior comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1350273 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1350273). 8. Any more fundamental answer will lie with Congress. In that forum, the practical impediments will be large and that is perhaps why so many had hoped the Court could cut through all these without needing to deal with the vested interests who will seek to block reform at every turn.