Machine-or-transformation test

Concept in patent law In United States patent law, the machine-or-transformation test is a test of patent eligibility under which a claim to a process qualifies for consideration if (1) the process is implemented by a particular machine in a non-conventional and non-trivial manner or (2) the process transforms an article from one state to another. The origin of the test can be traced to the 1972 government's reply brief on the merits in the US Supreme Court case Gottschalk v. Benson: we submit that the cases follow such a rule [machine or transformation]—implicitly or explicitly—and that they cannot be rationalized otherwise. The test was also mentioned in the 1970s patent-eligibility trilogy—Gottschalk v. Benson, Parker v. Flook, and Diamond v. Diehr. The "machine-or-transformation test" was finally endorsed in 2008 by Federal Circuit in Bilski, while explicitly overruling its earlier “useful, tangible and concrete result” test adopted in 1998 in State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group, Inc. Numerous legal commentators praised the "machine-or-transformation" test for its simplicity, objectivity, reliability, and independence of the result from time and