In one of its last decisions of today, the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (BPAI) reversed a Patent Examiner's 35 U.S.C. §101 non-statutory subject matter rejection of a key Invatron Systems invention. As a Miami Patent Attorney, this case was interesting because I haven't seen any BPAI decisions regarding 35 U.S.C. §101, much less a decision that invokes Bilski, in a while.
At issue was an Invatron Systems claim pertaining to a scale for weighing items, wherein the scale included a computer that performed a series of steps, such as providing a coupon. The Examiner found the claims recite a method of purely mental steps, not tied to another statutory class. The Appellants contended the claimed method recites steps including providing a coupon to the customer and that these steps cannot be performed purely mentally since there is no way to provide a coupon without the coupon being physically inputted into the weigh station display.
The court explained the Bilski machine-or-transformation test as follows: "A claimed process is surely patent-eligible under § 101 if: (1) it is tied to a particular machine or apparatus, or (2) it transforms a particular article into a different state or thing." The court explained that "the use of a specific machine or transformation of an article must impose meaningful limits on the claim's scope to impart patent-eligibility" and "the involvement of the machine or transformation in the claimed process must not merely be insignificant extra-solution activity." In re Bilski, 545 F.3d 17 943 (Fed. Cir. 2008) (en banc), petition for cert. granted, 77 USLW 3442 (U.S. Jan. 28, 2009) (No. 08-964).
The BPAI agreed with the Appellants. See the BPAI decision here. The BPAI stated claim 17 recited a method for providing information to a weigh station, where customer specific information is provided to the weigh station display. That is, claim 17 recited a manner of entering data to a weigh station and displaying the inputted information. As such, claim 17 required a specific structure that captures, stores, and displays specific data. This specific structure ties the recited method to a particular machine, in that the method recites how to operate a weigh station with a weigh station display. Since there is a particular machine required, claim 17 satisfies the machine prong of the machine-or-transformation test and the transformation prong need not be evaluated. As a result, the BPAI reversed the Examiner's 35 U.S.C. §101 non-statutory subject matter rejection under Bilski.
The lesson learned in this case is that although a claim may not explicitly and positively recite a structural element, the claim may require a specific structure to perform the steps of the claim. If that structure satisfies the machine prong of the machine-or-transformation test, an Examiner's 35 U.S.C. §101 non-statutory subject matter rejection may be reversed under Bilski.
