By Michael Borella — When the Supreme Court began poking around into the law of patent eligibility just over a decade ago, the invention topics that it considered under the abstract idea exception were limited to types of financial transactions. The invention of Bilski v. Kappos was directed to hedging and that of Alice v. CLS Bank was directed to escrow. While both inventions were ostensibly computer implemented, they involved software being applied to just one rather narrow field of endeavor. The Court’s findings of invalidity in both cases are open to criticism both on procedural and substantive grounds, and…
