Parker v. Flook

Case Date: 05/05/1978

Parker v. Flook, 437 U.S. 584 (1978) was a 1978 United States Supreme Court decision that ruled that an invention that departs from the prior art only in its use of a mathematical algorithm is patent-eligible only if the implementation is novel and unobvious. The algorithm itself must be considered as if it were part of the prior art. The case was argued on April 25, 1978 and was decided June 22, 1978. This case is the second member of the Supreme Court's patent-eligibility trilogy. [1]