Philosopher interpretation of patent eligibility

Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International is a legal case that is brought up in this article on Foss Patents. Though through the brief reading I still get little idea of the real deal of this matter, hopefully through my basic analysis in the writing might bring some hope to the clarity for patent newcomers like myself.

According to Wikipedia, Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International is a legal case about software patents that presents the issue whether "certain claims" about a computer-implemented services for facilitating financial transaction ineligible for patent protection. In short, the outcome of this legal case will essentially establish a standard/test of patent-eligibility, as well as knowing how a software patent can be infringed under what situation.

Alice Corporation has four patents that specify particular methods for financial-trading system. They discovered that CLS Bank was also using similar technology back in 2002, thus Alice initiated the litigation.

Initially, the Columbia district court ruled that Alice's patents were invalid because their patent claims are abstract ideas, thus those patents were not eligible for patent protection under 35 U.S.C. § 101. Interestingly, the court thought that Alice's patents were practices of "basic business or financial concept", and the computer implementation of such abstract concept is not considered novel. The intention of the court was to protect an abstract idea from being monopolized.

Of course, Alice appealed the case to Federal Circuit, which decided that Alice's patents are indeed patent-eligible unless the claim is evidently an abstract idea. This raised the question to CLS Bank and of course everybody who is in the software-related industry, what kind of test the court should use to absolutely determine whether a computer-implemented invention is a patent-ineligible abstract idea. In addition, does the presence of the "computer" related terms in a claim ever make a patent-ineligible one to be patent-eligible.

I would like to stop here for the sake of information overflow to myself. But this is definitely an interesting topic to look into in the patent wonderland. I feel like I'm almost like a philosopher contemplating the meaning of life.