Survey results: Would Metabolite’s claim 13 be found patentable under the reasoning of Bilski?
Patent Law Blog (Patently-O):
Earlier in the week, I wrote about Bilski in relation to the recent diagnosis patent case of LabCorp v. Metabolite. Metabolite's claim 13 reads as follows:
13. A method for detecting a deficiency of cobalamin or folate in warm-blooded animals comprising the steps of: assaying a body fluid for an elevated level of total homocysteine; and correlating an elevated level of total homocysteine in said body fluid with a deficiency of cobalamin or folate.
I asked the following question to Patently-O readers and received a response from about 200 readers: It reads as follows:
Would Metabolite's claim 13 be found patentable under the reasoning of Bilski?
The response can be broken down as follows: 31% of responses would find the claim to include patentable subject matter while the remaining 69% would reject the claim under Section 101. Of those who would find the claim patentable, the vast majority (89%) reason that the claim includes a transformation. In my discussion of the case, I indicated one argument for showing how the assay step could be considered a transformation. The remaining 11% of those who would find the claim patentable say that it is tied to a particular machine or apparatus. None of the responses indicated that the claim satisfied both the machine and transformation prongs of the test.
Of the 69% of "unpatentable" responses, the majority (72%) saw the claim unpatentable as neither a machine nor a transformation. 43% of those asserting unpatentability saw the claim as unpatentable under the revived mental steps doctrine of bilski. Included in these figures is the 16% who saw the patent violating both the revived mental steps doctrine and the machine-or-transformation test.
The survey did not ask demographic data. However, of those responses using a USPTO IP address, 86% would find the claim unpatentable…