Brooks Kenyon
Under 35 U.S.C §101, a patent must be either a new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter and, thus, must not lay claim to any idea that is abstract. This abstraction can be increasingly difficult to eliminate when drafting software claims because the implementation of code onto a generic computer is somewhat abstract in nature. Areas of software that are, and are not, abstract have been hotly debated and a thorn in the side of court system. Hence, when Justice Thomas opined that the Supreme Court “need not labor to delimit the precise contours of the ‘abstract ideas’ category” in Alice Corp. Pty. Ltd. v. CLS Bank Intern., he must have realized that abstaining from such a seminal issue would create ripples, if not waves, within the already confusing realm of software patents.