Subject-Matter Eligibility for Business Methods

On December 15, 2016, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued a guide on subject-matter eligibility under 35 U.S.C. 101, this time focusing on examples in business methods. The guide follows a series of examples issued as follow-ups to the USPTO’s 2014 Interim Guidance on Subject Matter Eligibility (IEG). The guide includes three examples or fact patterns, each with one or more representative claims. The first fact pattern relates to a system for filtering content retrieved from an Internet computer network by individually controlled access network accounts. The claim in the example was found to be eligible under…

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