"The Supreme Court on Monday loosened the limits on the kinds of inventions that are eligible for patent protection in a case that was closely watched for its impacts on innovation. […] The high court unanimously rejected the inventors' claim […b]ut in doing so, it also rejected a lower court's reasoning that only inventions involving machinery or physical "transformations" are eligible for patents. Some experts hailed the decision as a move that could bring patent law out of the industrial era, when inventions were more likely to be machines, into the information age, where they are often are less tangible. […] "It wasn't the roof-shaking decision that people expected," said Harold C. Wegner, a patent law expert and the author of a newsletter on patent topics. "It leaves open a lot of questions over the extent to which business methods are patent eligible." "
Source: Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/28/AR2010062803523.html
