Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 6th Jul 2011 14:00 UTC
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RE[2]: Comment by pablo_marx
by JAlexoid on Wed 6th Jul 2011 20:36
in reply to "RE: Comment by pablo_marx"




Member since:
2007-03-07
Thom's claims about when software patents were first granted are completely wrong, but he refuses to admit it. Just a few examples that prove he is wrong:
- The first known software patent was granted in Britain on August 17, 1967 entitled "A Computer Arranged for the Automatic Solution of Linear Programming Problems"
- On November 20th, 1972, in Gottschalk v. Benson, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled a software patent application was invalid because of prior art dating to the 19th century. However, in its ruling, it specifically stated it was only ruling against that particular patent, and NOT software patents in general. "it is said that the decision precludes a patent for any program servicing a computer. We do not so hold."
- On May 26th, 1981, the first known U.S. software patent was granted to Satya Pal Asija for a natural language interface program.
- In 1994, Stac Electronics successfully sued Microsoft over software parent violations regarding the DoubleSpace disk compression technology included in MS DOS 6.0.
In short, the claim that software patents were not granted until 1998 is clearly false.
Edited 2011-07-06 18:05 UTC