The Court held that those criteria were "clues" to patent eligibility but declined to hold that they were necessary conditions for patent-eligibility in all cases, even though every case in which the Supreme Court had approved a process patent thus far had involved such a process. Impact This decision was widely seen as confirming that software by itself was not directly patentable. What patent attorneys/agents had been doing in the meantime, however, was to get patent protection on software inventions by claiming the algorithm in combination with the general purpose digital computer programmed to carry out the algorithm. Thus they technically purported to be claiming a new machine and this, the lower patent court held, was patentable. The boundary between when a computer implemented process is purely an abstract idea (and thus not patentable) and when it is a process implementing the idea in a practical way (and thus is patentable) is still a matter of debate within the U.S. patent office. ("The Supreme Court has not been clear...as to whether such subject matter is excluded from the scope of 101 because it represents laws of nature, natural phenomena, or abstract ideas.") It also remains a contested issue whether process patent claims must be directed to a transformation of substances or else embody a nontrivial, novel implementing machine or device. The PTO has taken this position in its arguments to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. See USPTO brief in In re Bilski. The Government also so argued in briefing the Benson case. The majority opinion in the Federal Circuit's opinion in In re Bilski adopts this position. Notes 35 U.S.C. 101 says, "Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title." 35 U.S.C. 100(b) gives the definition for process, "The term ‘process’ means process, art or method, and includes a new use of a known process, machine, manufacture, composition of matter, or material." See also List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 409 Software patent CyberSource Corp. v. Retail Decisions, Inc. Bilski v. Kappos Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International References Further reading External links Software patent case law United States patent case law United States Supreme Court cases 1972 in United States case law United States