Bilski v. Kappos, a business patent case that made it to the Supreme Court was decided 3 months ago. Basically, Bilski had patented a method of hedging energy based on the weather.

The Supreme Court unanimously invalidated the patent, it was after the unique idea that one should bet on the weather, but by a 5-4 majority, they kept the business method patent, albeit with a tightening of standards:

While all nine justices agreed that the “invention” at issue in the case—a method for hedging weather-related risk in energy trading developed by Bernard Bilski and Rand Warsaw—was too abstract to merit patent protection, only four signed on to Kennedy’s opinion.

That opinion held that the “machine-or-transformation” test for patentability–created by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in its Bilski decision–was a “useful clue” when gauging a subject’s patentability but shouldn’t be considered the only applicable test.

I think that this was generally a loss for patent sanity, though it does make getting a business patent more restrictive, though, unsurprisingly, SCOTUS didn’t say how much more restrictive the standards should be.

My earlier posts on the matter.