The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case regarding patents on so-called "business methods" (the most famous of which is probably Amazon's one-click ordering process). Historically, methods of doing business were not patentable in the United States; however, in the 1998 State Street Bank case, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that business methods should not necessarily be excluded from patent protection. A wave of business method patent applications have followed the ruling.
Interestingly, a number of large technology companies oppose the protection of business methods, claiming that the incentive to invent created by patent protection is simply not necessary in the case of business methods: IBM maintains that the patents are not needed to promote innovation; businesses would come up with the products even without patent protection. "You're creating a new 20-year monopoly for no good reason," IBM's top in-house patent attorney, David Kappos, told BusinessWeek last year.
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