Topic summary
Patent eligibility
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Patentable subject matter.
United States
There is an important relationship between patent eligibility and non-obviousness tests in the US patent law. The non-obviousness criterion can be easily met if a claim is based on a discovery of new natural phenomenon/principle/law. In the patentable subject matter analysis, however, this "discovery" is assumed to be prior art, and an "additional inventive concept" must be present in the claim.