math patents

[tien@well.com (Lee Tien)]

In reply to the message excerpted below:

I believe Jim's not looked back far enough.  My recollection from law
school is that the law was friendly to math patents in the period before
the Supreme Court weighed in.  There were some PTO denials, which courts
reversed (I think the Court of Claims heard these back then).  So I think
the trend was toward patenting processes even if mathematical until
Gottschalk v. Benson.  It's a conceptually messy area because "processes"
have long been patentable (like the Morse telegraphy/Bell telephony
patents) but the Supreme Court saw the Benson application as violating the
doctrine against patenting "laws of nature."  

Lee

From: jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>
Date: Sat, 06 Apr 1996 14:52:12 -0800
Subject: Re: So, what crypto legislation (if any) is necessary?

At 01:07 PM 4/6/96 -0500, Black Unicorn wrote:

>> I contend that had he talked to Phillip Zimmermann in 1990 or so, he would 
>> have told Zimmermann that "It's illegal to write an encryption program 
using 
>> RSA, because it's patented!  You'll never get away with it!"
>
>I would have indicated that "you're going to face the prospect of 
>intellectual property litigation, and that can get nasty in the extreme."

One thing I've never heard is an explanation of how computer software and 
especially mathematics went from "extremely not patentable" in the early and 
middle 1970's, to "patentable" once Messr's Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman 
invented a piece of mathematics that the government wanted to deny to the 
public.  How convenient.