Sidebar

In 2003, for the first time in its 170-year history, the United States Patent Office began awarding patents for legal methods, such as tax strategies, in addition to traditional inventions such as Tylenol or the telephone. Commentators—including the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, the General Counsel of the Patent Office, and the Chair of the ABA Intellectual Property Law Section—have accepted the Patent Office’s power to grant legal method patents (as a type of business method, which were ruled patentable by the federal courts in 1998), but at the same time have criticized this new type of patent on policy grounds.