Judgment
The judgment approved a new four-step test to be used when assessing whether or not an application actually describes an invention. The four-step test is as follows:
- Properly construe the claim;
- Identify the actual contribution;
- Ask whether the contribution falls solely within excluded subject matter; and
- Check whether the contribution is technical in nature.
The second step, that of identifying the contribution, was highlighted as being the most problematic since it may be difficult to determine what the contribution actually is.
Read more about this topic: Aerotel V Telco And Macrossan's Application
Famous quotes containing the word judgment:
“It isn’t safe to sit in judgment upon another person’s illusion when you are not on the inside. While you are thinking it is a dream, he may be knowing it is a planet.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. The power of invention has been conferred by nature upon few, and the labour of learning those sciences which may, by mere labour, be obtained, is too great to be willingly endured; but every man can exert some judgment as he has upon the works of others; and he whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of critic.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“In the case of our main stock of well-worn predicates, I submit that the judgment of projectibility has derived from the habitual projection, rather than the habitual projection from the judgment of projectibility. The reason why only the right predicates happen so luckily to have become well entrenched is just that the well entrenched predicates have thereby become the right ones.”
—Nelson Goodman (b. 1906)