It took 231 days for a decision to be rendered in Bilski v. Kappos, longer than any other Supreme Court patent case in recent memory. Since oral arguments took place on November 9, 2009, the Supreme Court had also received 65 amicus briefs, which is also believed to be a record for a case dealing with patent law. The long wait was exacerbated by the fact that the Bilski decision was expected to have determined the fate of business method patents, or to at least provide some guidelines on what constitutes patentable subject matter.
Indeed, business method patents survived -- but by a hair. Departing Justice Stevens was expected to author the majority opinion, but the controlling opinion in the case turned out to be Justice Kennedy's, with five justices concurring with the greater part of it (Justice Scalia didn't sign on to certain portions of the opinion). The majority opinion wound up rejecting Bilski's risk-hedging method because it was an abstract idea -- something all nine justices agreed with -- but left the question of the patentability of business methods untouched.
Justice Stevens wrote a concurring opinion that was an indictment of the patentability of business methods. Stevens opined that business method patents stifled innovation, depressed "the dynamism of the market," and were thus undesirable. However, his opinion garnered only four votes, and wound up being merely a concurrence, rather than the controlling opinion.
For now, business method patents live on, and United States patent law remains mostly unchanged by the decision in Bilski v. Kappos. However, the Federal Circuit is expected to develop some "limiting doctrines" for the field -- somewhere between the expansive standard set by the Federal Circuit in the State Street Bank decision and the machine-or-transformation test, which has been deemed by the Supreme Court, in the instant case, to be too restrictive.
Read the opinion in Bilski v. Kappos.
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