I fail to see how a "procedure" in any sense could be patentable subject matter. If you've developed a robotic arm that can perform a surgical procedure you get a patent on the arm itself; not the motions it makes or the software it runs. That is abstract and ridiculous.

I appreciate your post. However it's not at all difficult to separate the procedure from the machine used to perform it, whatever it may be. The latter is already coverable by a utility patent on the physical tools. The former is simply a description of steps, and in the case of robotic surgeries it will invariably be software.

But we're not just talking about software here. The U.S. is trying to make medical procedures patentable in all but the most manual cases. In other words, only if a procedure can be done completely by hand is it exempt; the moment you use any sort of "medical device" in the surgery then the steps themselves become protected intellectual property, in addition to the utility patents on the devices themselves.

Source: http://keionline.org/node/1825

That seems outlandish, but I honestly don't have a better explanation.

OH, no it's real. Remember US was the one that came up with SOPA and ACTA, too. It wasn't China. It was US, the land of the free. They wouldn't be "trolling" 3 times in a row. They're serious about this.