Patent eligibility

Patent eligibility refers to the types of inventions which can be protected by a patent. Traditionally excluded are laws of nature, abstract ideas, and natural phenomena, but the scope of those exclusions has expanded in recent judicial decisions.

U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Bilski v. Kappos (2010) and Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank (2014) made it more difficult to patent computer-related inventions by expanding the exclusion from eligibility of "abstract ideas," while Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus (2012) and Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics (2013), denied patents to life sciences under an expanded view of "laws of nature."

As of 2019, application of these decisions resulted in courts invalidating for patent ineligibility twice as many software patents as they sustained, and invalidating 25% more life science patents as upheld.