The Supreme Court granted review today in LabCorp v. Metabolite. The case turns on the scope of what processes are patentable, and what processes are not, under section 101 of the Patent Act. Dennis Crouch has already put up a thorough post about the case at the Patently-O blog, one of my daily must-reads. Although the case itself involves a medical process, the Court’s analysis of the question (the first of its type since 1981) is almost sure to have major effects on the question of the patentability of computer-implemented processes.
UPDATE: Nick Szabo has more analysis of the LabCorp case here.
Depending on the influence Justice Stevens, the author of Parker v. Flook, on the other justices who have never heard a 35 U.S.C. 101 subject matter case, this could have very radical implications for software patents as well as business method patents, as I describe here.
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