Bilski v. Kappos’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

84 federal appellate · 74 district · 6 state decisions

Most-quoted passages

The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 321 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “A process is a mode of treatment of certain materials to produce a given result. It is an act, or a series of acts, performed upon the subject-matter to be transformed and reduced to a different state or thing. If new and useful, it is just as patentable as is a piece of machinery. In the language of the patent law, it is an art. The machinery pointed out as suitable to perform the process may or may not be new or patentable; whilst the process itself may be altogether new, and produce an entirely new result. The process requires that certain things should be done with certain substances, and in a certain order; but the tools to be used in doing this may be of secondary consequence.”

   19 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. SRI International, Inc. v. Cisco Systems, Inc. · Intellectual Ventures I, LLC v. Canon Inc.

2. “any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof.”

   18 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Research Corp. Technologies, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp. · Solutran, Inc. v. U.S. Bancorp

3. “the prohibition against patenting abstract ideas cannot be circumvented by attempting to limit the use of [the idea] to a particular technological environment.”

   12 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. Chargepoint, Inc. v. Semaconnect, Inc. · Athena Diagnostics, Inc. v. Mayo Collaborative Servs., LLC