Ruling on a case called Bilski v. Kappos, the high court rejected the notion of a single standard suggested by a lower court, and allowed that business processes may be patentable but opted not to define within what scope.

The high court also said the specific example before it was too abstract to be patented.

Bernard Bilski and Rand Warsaw had brought their case to the Supreme Court after the Washington Appeals Court ruled their business process could not be patented because it was not tied to a machine or apparatus.

The federal court's decision had required that a patentable process had to "involve a transformation of one thing into something else."

Biomedical processes were likely to benefit widely from the ruling; it was not immediately clear if the breadth of the ruling might include pharmaceuticals.

Justice Anthony Kennedy highlighted basic patent eligibility of "inventions in the Information Age," naming specifically "software, advanced diagnostic medicine techniques, and inventions based on linear programming, data compression and manipulation of digital signals."

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