> The Supreme Court already ruled against software patents in Gottschalk v. Benson. That's not accurate; the statement is too categorical. (All categorical st

> The Supreme Court already ruled against software patents in Gottschalk v. Benson. That's not accurate; the statement is too categorical. (All categorical statements are bad, including this one.) The 1972 Gottschalk v. Benson case [1] involved claims to a particular type of software, namely a machine-executed mathematical algorithm for converting binary-coded decimal into pure binary. The Supreme Court ruled that those particular claims were unpatentable. Much the same thing happened in 1978's Parker v. Flook case, involving claims to a method of updating an alarm limit. As often happens, however, the Court later refined its analysis as new cases provided new fact patterns. In 1981 the Court ruled, in Diamond v. Diehr [3], that a claim to controlling an otherwise-conventional physical process by software was indeed patentable. More recently, in Bilski v. Kappos [4], the Court affirmed a rejection of claims to a particular software-implemented method of hedging against the risk of price changes in commodities trading, but it refused to impose a categorical exclusion of patentability for such claims. For what it's worth, I seldom if ever read IP Watchdog anymore (the source of the parent comment's long italicized quote). [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottschalk_v._Benson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottschalk_v._Benson [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_v._Flook http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_v._Flook [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_v._Diehr http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_v._Diehr [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilski_v._Kappos http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilski_v._Kappos