Ginsburg, Jane C. --- "State Street or Easy Street: Is Patenting Business Methods Good for Business?" [2006] ELECD 257; in Hansen, Hugh (ed), "US Intellectual Property Law and Policy" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006)

Book Title: US Intellectual Property Law and Policy

Editor(s): Hansen, Hugh

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781845428662

Section: Chapter 1

Section Title: State Street or Easy Street: Is Patenting Business Methods Good for Business?

Author(s): Ginsburg, Jane C.

Number of pages: 38

Extract:

Chapter 1

State Street or Easy Street: Is Patenting
Business Methods Good For Business?
Rochelle Cooper Dreyfuss*


American patent law has changed significantly in this half-century. Interestingly,
many of these changes have something to do with Judge Giles S. Rich. He was
the principal drafter of the Patent Act of 19521 and he was one of the first judges
to sit on the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which was established in
1982 to consolidate adjudication of patent appeals.2 Possibly the longest-
sitting federal judge,3 Rich died in June 1999, not long after he made yet another
profound mark on the law of invention: the decision in State Street Bank & Trust
Co. v. Signature Financial Group, Inc.4 State Street is important for two reasons.
It simplifies the law on patenting software and it reads patent law to encompass
protection for business methods. Because of the contemporary significance of
the computer industry, there will surely be much technical discussion of the first
aspect of the opinion, the protection accorded to mathematical algorithms. This
paper will, however, mainly examine the second half of the decision, for it has

* Pauline Newman Professor of Law, NYU School of Law. I wish to thank John
Peschel and Jessica Litman for comments on earlier drafts, the Filomen D'Agostino
and Max E. Greenberg Research Fund of the New York University School of Law for
its financial support, and Robert Pfister, NYU Class of '01, for research assistance.
1
The 1952 ...