Over thirty-five years ago in Diamond v. Diehr, 450
U.S. 175 (1981) (hereinafter "Diehr"), the
United States Supreme Court struck a compromise for patenting
software inventions. In Diehr, the Supreme Court
recognized that not every discovery warranted patent protection. In
particular, the Supreme Court viewed laws of nature, natural
phenomena, and abstract ideas as being such fundamental truths that
no one deserved an exclusive right over them. However, the
Diehr court found that a process designed to solve a
"technological problem" in conventional industry practice
could become patent eligible. In Diehr, the
patent-eligible solution involved using the Arrhenius equation in a
process for molding rubber products. While the solution in
Diehr makes sense as patent-eligible subject matter in
hindsight, what remained unclear for decades is how to identify a
"technological problem" specifically solved by a given
claim.
