The Natural Complexity of Patent Eligibility

AuthorJacob S. Sherkow
PositionFellow, Center for Law and the Biosciences, Stanford Law School
Pages1137-1196
1137
The Natural Complexity of Patent
Eligibility
Jacob S. Sherkow
INTRODUCTION .................................................................................... 1139
I. THE LAW AND SCIENCE OF PATENT ELIGIBILITY .................................. 1144
A. THE EARLY RULE AGAINST PATENTING “PRINCIPLES ...................... 1146
B. FUNK BROTHERS SEED CO. V. KALO INOCULANT CO. AND THE
RISE OF PATENT ELIGIBILITYS “NATURAL TERMS .......................... 1148
C. THE MODERN DOCTRINE OF PATENT ELIGIBILITY AND SCIENTIFIC
PHILOSOPHY .................................................................................. 1151
II. NATURAL COMPLEXITY AND NATURAL LAWS, PHENOMENA, AND
PRODUCTS ............................................................................................ 1155
A. CONSTANCY AND CAUSALITY ........................................................... 1159
B. PROBABILISM ................................................................................. 1161
C. FUNDAMENTALISM ......................................................................... 1164
III. THE EFFECTS OF NATURAL COMPLEXITY ON PATENT ELIGIBILITY ...... 1166
A. FALSE EQUIVALENCY ....................................................................... 1167
B. MARGINALIZATION OF CLAIM LANGUAGE ........................................ 1169
C. TECHNOLOGY-SPECIFIC EFFECTS ...................................................... 1173
IV. SIMPLIFYING PATENT ELIGIBILITY ........................................................ 1176
A. PATENT ELIGIBILITYS COMPLEXITY ................................................ 1176
B. DECOMPOSITION AND LOCALIZATION AS STRATEGIES FOR NATURAL
COMPLEXITY .................................................................................. 1178
C. A MECHANISTIC DESCRIPTION OF PATENT ELIGIBILITY .................... 1180
1. Identifying the Locus of Control and Decomposing
Patents ................................................................................... 1182
Fellow, Center for Law and the Biosciences, Stanford Law School. For their comment s,
and for reading earlier drafts of this paper, thanks to Will Baude, Nathan Chapman, Beth
Colgan, Becky Eisenberg, Shubha Ghosh, Hank Greely, Sara Gabriella Hoffman, Tim
Holbrook, Matt Lamkin, Peter Lee, Mark Lemley, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, Menesh Patel, J.J.
Prescott, Zach Price, Sarah Rajec, Jacob Rooksby, Amanda Shanor, Ted Sichelman, and Andrew
K. Woods. Thanks as well to the participants at WIPIP 2013 and PatCon 3 for their helpful
comments. And a final thanks to Amanda and Lilah for keeping things simple.
1138 IOWA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 99:1137
2. Localizing Patents’ Components to Patent Eligibility’s
Goals ...................................................................................... 1183
a. Claim Scope ...................................................................... 1184
b. The Claims’ and Specification’s Relationship to the Prior
Art ................................................................................... 1187
c. The Specification’s Teaching Function .............................. 1189
3. Building a Mechanistic Description of Patent Eligibility .. 1191
CONCLUSION ....................................................................................... 1195
2014] THE NATURAL COMPLEXITY OF PATENT ELIGIBILITY 1139
INTRODUCTION
Recently, patents on human genes, software, and business methods have
stoked a heated public discussion on patent law. Much of that discussion has
focused on the doctrine of patent eligibility, or patentable subject matter, a
century-and-a-half old legal doctrine that limits the types of inventions that
can be patented.1 The doctrine currently prohibits patents on “laws of
nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas,” as well as “products of
nature.”2 Courts and commentators have long viewed these phrases as
legalistic terms of art. That is, terms that have, or should have, particular
legal significance apart from a scientific or philosophical exegesis of the
words themselves.3 But there is good reason to doubt this assumption. Since
patent eligibility’s inception, the Supreme Court has never provided a
concrete definition or a legal test for what makes a natural “law,”
“phenomenon,” or “product.” Rather, it has tethered patent eligibility’s
1. See, e.g., Ed Black, Op-Ed., Patent Reform Will Remove the Breaks from Innovation, SAN JOSE
MERCURY NEWS (Mar. 15, 2009, 8:00 PM), http://perma.cc/YF9S-BLQK (“The only rea l
solution is to raise the basic standard of what is a patentable invention.”); Editorial, Cong ress, Not
Courts, Must Fix Flaws in Gene-Patent System, BOSTON.COM (Nov. 21, 2010), http://perma.cc/
Q826-Q7QK (“Perhaps the best policy would be to simply do away with [gene] patents.”);
Editorial, Patently Ridiculous, N.Y. TIMES (Mar. 22, 2006), http://perma.cc/GA9R-NTLZ (“The
definition of what is patentable has slowly evolved to include business practices and broad
ideas.”); Editorial, Reining in Patents, L.A. TIMES (Mar. 30, 2010), http://perma.cc/PH9V-EKSQ
(“Underlying many of these disputes is a fundamental question about what patents should
cover.”).
2. Diamond v. Diehr, 450 U.S. 175, 185 (1981) (“Excluded from such patent protection
are laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas.”); Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S.
303, 313 (1980) (“Congress thus recognized that the relevant distinction was not between
living and inanimate things, but between products of nature, whether living or not, and human-
made inventions.”).
3. See, e.g., Dan L. Burk & Mark A. Lemley, Inherency, 47 WM. & MARY L. REV. 371 (2005)
(viewing patentable subject matter as a function of “inherency”); Tun-Jen Chiang, The Rules and
Standards of Patentable Subject Matter, 2010 WIS. L. REV. 1353 (dividing patent eligibility into
easier “rules” and more difficult “standards”); Dennis Crouch & Robert P. Merges, Operating
Efficiently Post-Bilski by Ordering Patent Doctrine Decision-Making, 25 BERKELEY TECH. L.J. 1673
(2010) (attempting to simplify patent eligibility through decision ordering); Rebecca S.
Eisenberg, Wisdom of the Ages or Dead-Hand Co ntrol? Patentable Subject Matter for Diagnostic Methods
After In Re Bilski , 3 CASE W. RES. J.L. TECH. & INTERNET 1, 50–64 (2012) (describing patent
eligibility through three normative functions); John M. Golden, Patentable Subject Matter and
Institutional Choice, 89 TEX. L. REV. 1041, 1079 (2011) (“[T]he real concern seems to be that
the so-called laws of nature cited by the Supreme Court are ‘abstract ideas’—generalized
descriptions untethered to any particular, practical ends.”); Eileen M. Kane, Patent Ineligibility:
Maintaining a Scientific Public Domain, 80 ST. JOHNS L. REV. 519, 551 (2006) (“It appears that
‘law of nature’ in patent law can be called a term of art . . . .”); Mark A. Lemley et al., Life After
Bilski, 63 STAN. L. REV. 1315, 1332–35 (2011) (tying patent eligibility to claim scope); Michael
Risch, Everything Is Patent able, 75 TENN. L. REV. 591 (2008) (arguing that the other
requirements for patentability, such as enablement, nonobviousness, and novelty, in total,
satisfy the doctrine of patent eligibility); Katherine J. Strandburg, Much Ado About Preemption, 50
HOUS. L. REV. 563, 569–86 (2012) (describing and criticizing patent eligibility as a test of
“preemption”).

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