"There you go, folks. Reductio ad absurdum: a company is a
machine, or at least analogous to one, kinda sorta like one.
Therefore any process or method they come up with to do business
would be patentable, presumably, in that universe. Well. Could
someone please patent what Wall Street just did to the economy, and
then refuse to license the "invention", so as to prevent those
dudes from ever doing it again? Or just patent flaming greed, will
you, somebody? Do the rest of us a favor and get it off the table
or at least constrained.
"The court rejected that claim about a company being analogous
to a machine, but Justice Pauline Newman, while agreeing with the
majority, nevertheless argued that it's good for the economy to
have business methods patents, so we shouldn't go too far in
limiting them. *Too far*?!"