ALICE CORPORATION PTY. LTD., Petitioner v. CLS BANK INTERNATIONAL et al., 573 U.S. 208

Summary

The patents at issue disclosed a computer-implemented scheme for mitigating settlement risk, i.e., the risk that only one party to a financial transaction would pay what it owed, by using a third-party intermediary. The issue was whether the claims were patent eligible under 35 U.S.C.S. § 101, or were instead drawn to a patent-ineligible abstract idea. The claims at issue were drawn to the abstract idea of intermediated settlement, and as such, the claims were directed to a patent-ineligible concept. Specifically, the concept of intermediated settlement was a fundamental economic practice, and the use of a third-party intermediary was a building block of the modern economy. The method claims, which merely required generic computer implementation, failed to transform the abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention. The computer components of the patent's method added nothing that was not already present when the steps were considered separately. The assignee's claims to a computer ...