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Examination Guidance on Eligibility

USPTO guidance, July 2024. It states that it does not have the force and effect of law. Read from the primary document; quotations verified against its own text.

Read this with Recentive v. Fox. This is what examiners are told. Recentive is what a court enforces. Read alone, the guidance reads as a more permissive standard than the one a patent meets in litigation.
What it says

The USPTO's July 2024 eligibility guidance directs examiners to ask whether a claim as a whole integrates a recited judicial exception into a practical application, including by reflecting an improvement in the functioning of a computer or another technical field, and states expressly that it does not constitute substantive rulemaking and does not have the force and effect of law.

The guidance directs examiners to ask whether a claim as a whole integrates a recited judicial exception into a practical application, including by reflecting an improvement in the functioning of a computer or another technical field.

It also disclaims its own legal force. The guidance states expressly that it does not constitute substantive rulemaking and does not have the force and effect of law.

Both halves matter together. It is what an applicant meets during examination, and it is not what a patent is measured against once it is litigated.

What This Does Not Decide

Presenting examination guidance as the law is the failure this page exists to avoid. This is the record in the corpus closest to the line, because its subject is the eligibility test itself. The guidance's own disclaimer is carried above for that reason, not as a footnote.
  • It does not say whether any claim is eligible, patentable, novel or non-obvious.
  • It does not bind a court, and it says so itself.
  • It does not change what the Federal Circuit has held. See the decisions in this section for that.

Educational, not legal advice. This page reports what an authority says. Applying it to a matter is work for a registered practitioner with the file in front of them.

Sources

  • USPTO, 2024 Guidance Update on Patent Subject Matter Eligibility (July 2024)
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