Today continues our mini-symposium on Alice v. CLS Bank with a guest post by Jeffrey A. Lefstin, Professor at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law.
Alice Corp. marks the Supreme Court’s eighth subject-matter eligibility case since the 1952 Act. Without question, the most problematic aspect of the Supreme Court’s § 101 jurisprudence has been discerning the actual test for patent-eligibility. In Mayo v. Prometheus, the Court purported to establish a general framework for subject-matter eligibility: that to be patent-eligible, a claim must include an “inventive concept” beyond an underlying fundamental principle, such as a law of nature, natural phenomenon, or abstract idea. The Court’s omission of significant reference to Mayo in Association for Molecular Pathology raised some doubt as to whether Mayo defined a universal test for eligibility under § 101. Yet Alice Corp. appears to confirm that Mayo is a universal framework for discriminating between ineligible principles and patent-eligible applications.
Mayo’s ambiguity led to the Federal Circuit’s fracture when it heard CLS Bank en banc. Mayo suggested three possible tests for patent-eligibility, without committing definitively to any one of them: inventive application, pre-emption, and “more than just apply it.” Justice Thomas’s opinion in Alice does not expressly commit to a single interpretation of Mayo. Yet Thomas’s presentation of Mayo, his framing of the Court’s prior precedent, and his application of Mayo to Alice’s claims all indicate that Alice endorses the last aspect of Mayo: that a claim must do more than set forth a fundamental principle and add a generic instruction to “apply it.” If this interpretation is correct, then Alice may in the long run be more significant for fields such as biotechnology, where Mayo’s “inventive application” aspect has cast doubt on the patent-eligibility of many discovery-based inventions.
Mayo’s first test of patent-eligibility is a test for inventive, or non-obvious, application of a fundamental principle. Drawing from Flook, where Justice Stevens wrote that “conventional and obvious” post-solution activity cannot transform an unpatentable principle into a patentable process, and Funk Brothers, where Justice Douglas held that a composition of matter was not patentable because the patentee’s application was “a simple step” once his discovery was assumed away, Justice Breyer invalidated Prometheus’s claims because the steps of the claimed method beyond the underlying natural law were merely “well-understood, routine, conventional activity already engaged in by the scientific community.” Breyer contrasted those steps with the additional steps claimed in Diamond v. Diehr, which in context were not “obvious, already in use, or purely conventional.” The Mayo Court drew support for this test from the Court of Exchequer’s 1843 opinion in Neilson v. Harford, where the patent was said to have been sustained because the patentee implemented his newly discovered principle “in an inventive way.”* This view of Mayo – that obvious applications of fundamental principles are not patent-eligible – was the one taken by the Northern District of California in the Ariosa v. Sequenom litigation, where Judge Ilston invalidated Sequenom’s claims largely because once Sequenom’s discovery of cell-free fetal DNA in the maternal bloodstream was assumed to be known, the application in the form of a test for fetal abnormalities required only routine and well-known methods of DNA amplification.
The second test of eligibility suggested by Mayo is a test of pre-emption. The Court explained that subject-matter exclusions were grounded in pre-emption, echoing Benson’s concern that patents should not monopolize “the basic tools of scientific and technological work.” Mayo seemed to state that pre-emption was analytically secondary to categorical exclusion: the concern that Prometheus’s claims would tie up too much future use of the underlying natural laws “simply reinforces our conclusion” that the claimed processes were not patent-eligible. Yet Breyer’s opinion intertwined pre-emption with inventive application as a criterion for patent-eligibility: Diehr was described as a case where the patentee had not sought to pre-empt the use of the Arrhenius equation. While the patentee in Flook had failed to “limit the claim to a particular application,” the supposedly unconventional steps in Neilson had “confined the claims to a particular, useful application of the principle.” This interpretation of Mayo was followed by the majority of the Federal Circuit when it heard CLS Bank en banc. Both Judge Rader and Judge Lourie rejected the notion that Mayo’s “inventive concept” demanded “inventiveness” in the sense of a non-obvious application. And while they disagreed on the proper framework, both Judge Lourie and Judge Rader founded their analyses on the question of whether Alice’s claims would pre-empt every practical application of the underlying abstract idea.
But Mayo suggests a third test beyond inventive application or pre-emption: that a claim must represent more than a mere direction to apply a fundamental principle. According to Justice Breyer, one could not transform a law of nature into a patent-eligible application by simply disclosing the law of nature, and adding the words “apply it;” Einstein or Archimedes, for example, could not have patented their famous discoveries by merely appending an instruction to apply them. This aspect of Mayo has received the least attention in subsequent cases and commentary. And yet in Justice Thomas’s opinion in Alice, it is this aspect of Mayo that becomes the core of the doctrine.
In Alice’s framework, once it has been determined that a claim is drawn to an abstract idea, ‘step two’ of the Mayo test is to determine whether it contains an “inventive concept” sufficient to transform the claim into a patent-eligible application. But in contrast to Flook and Mayo, “inventive concept” in Alice bears little trace of “inventiveness.” Justice Thomas does describe the computer implementation in Alice as “conventional.” But nowhere does he label it non-inventive, and the word obvious is conspicuously lacking from the opinion. And while Alice hardly addresses the Federal Circuit’s opinions at all, it may be significant that Thomas never contradicts Judge Lourie’s and Judge Rader’s rejection of “inventiveness” as an aspect of “inventive concept” in their CLS Bank opinions.
The contrast between Alice and Mayo is most apparent in their treatment of Diehr. In Mayo, the claims in Diehr represented an inventive application of the Arrhenius equation, and were not “obvious, already in use, or purely conventional.” But in Alice, the claims in Diehr were sustained not because they were non-obvious, but because “they improved an existing technological process,” and achieved a result the industry had not been able to obtain. Likewise, in Mayo, the failing of the Flook claims was that the steps of the claim were well-known, conventional or obvious; in Alice, while Thomas notes that the Flook implementation was purely conventional, Flook primarily stands for the proposition that limitation to a particular technological environment does not render an abstract idea patent eligible.
As for pre-emption, which intertwined so closely with inventive application in Mayo, is hardly present for ‘Mayo step two’ in Alice. Again the characterization of precedent is telling: in Mayo, the claim in Benson was vulnerable because it was “overly broad.” In Alice, Benson requires a “new and useful” – but not inventive – application of an idea for patent eligibility, but the lesson of Benson is that simply implementing a principle on a computer is not a patentable application.
For Justice Thomas, the ‘step two’ inquiry involves neither inventiveness nor pre-emption, but revolves around Mayo’s proscription against “more than just apply it.” Alice follows Flook and Mayo in holding that “conventional” activity cannot transform a principle into a patent-eligible application, but in Alice “conventional” seems to connote generic more than it connotes obvious. Thus Thomas introduces ‘step two,’ the search for an inventive concept, by invoking the third aspect of Mayo: patent-eligible application requires more than a statement of the abstract ideas plus the words ‘apply it.’ And while Thomas notes that the measuring steps in Mayo were “well known in the art,” he again quotes the ‘more than apply it’ language from Mayo to establish that those steps adding nothing of significance to the underlying natural law.
Most significantly for the Alice analysis, Thomas ends his summary of Mayo by quoting language that played little role in Mayo itself: it was not that conventional steps cannot supply an ‘inventive concept,’ but “conventional steps, specified at a high level of generality” (emphasis added) could not supply an inventive concept. For it is genericness, not lack of invention or pre-emption, that dominates the remainder of Thomas’s opinion. His summary of the Court’s § 101 jurisprudence touches upon the notion of pre-emption, but emphasizes above all else the requirement of “more than generic” application:
These cases demonstrate that the mere recitation of a generic computer cannot transform a patent-ineligible abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention. Stating an abstract idea “while adding the words ‘apply it’” is not enough for patent eligibility. Nor is limiting the use of an abstract idea “‘to a particular technological environment.’ ” Stating an abstract idea while adding the words “apply it with a computer” simply combines those two steps, with the same deficient result. Thus, if a patent’s recitation of a computer amounts to a mere instruction to “implemen[t]” an abstract idea “on . . . a computer,” that addition cannot impart patent eligibility. This conclusion accords with the pre- emption concern that undergirds our §101 jurisprudence. Given the ubiquity of computers, wholly generic computer implementation is not generally the sort of “additional featur[e]” that provides any “practical assurance that the process is more than a drafting effort designed to monopolize the [abstract idea] itself.”
Similarly, Alice’s application of the test to the claims in suit emphasizes “more than apply it” and generic application; the question for Justice Thomas “is whether the claims here do more than simply instruct the practitioner to implement the abstract idea of intermediated settlement on a generic computer.” Thomas does describe the functions performed by the computer as “routine, conventional, and well-known in the field,” but his characterization serves to support the conclusion that the claimed steps do nothing more than define generic computer implementation. And taken as a whole, the claims at issue fail not because they lack inventiveness, nor because they reach too broadly, but because they amount to “’nothing significantly more’ than an instruction to apply the abstract idea of intermediated settlement using some unspecified, generic computer.
So Alice may fail to provide clear boundaries for the eligibility of computer-implemented inventions. But it could clarify something more important. As I have described in a recent paper, the actual test for patent-eligibility in cases like Neilson v. Harford, and in American jurisprudence for the next century, was a requirement that the patentee claim a specific mode of application of a fundamental principle, rather than a generic claim to the principle as applied. If Alice does indeed endorse the third aspect of Mayo, then the test for patent-eligibility is not a question of non-obvious application, nor a question of pre-emption, but a question of whether the claim does significantly more than state a fundamental principle coupled with an instruction to “apply it.” Embracing that aspect of Mayo could signal a return to the historical standard of patent-eligibility.
*As I discussed in a previous post, the Court’s reliance on Neilson in Mayo and Flook was entirely misplaced. The patent in Neilson was sustained not because the patentee’s implementation was inventive, but precisely because it was entirely conventional and well-known in the art.