Gottschalk v. Benson, 1972
In the History of Software Patents, this is an important early Supreme Court case. In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed a case involving patent application describing an invention as a method for converting binary-coded decimal numerals into pure binary numerals in a general purpose digital computer. The Court found that the invention was not patentable. The Supreme Court stated that this decision did not preclude ever finding a computer program patentable.
However, for years after this case came out, patent office examiners felt that no software was patentable, and they would routinely issue 101 rejections against patent applications that contained the word “algorithm.” A direct quote from the Gottschalk v. Benson case follows:
It is argued that a process patent must either…