Intuitive Patenting

Patentable subject matter determinations are ultimately based not on judicial doctrines, tests, statutes, or even on the economic rationales underlying the patent system; rather, the fundamental touchstone for what qualifies as patentable technology is simply intuition. Specifically, despite the Federal Circuit’s rejection of “technological arts” as a linguistically bright-line test, patentable subject matter decisions inevitably devolve into what is, at base, an intuitive sense of what constitutes technology of the type protectable under the patent system.