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.