KAPPOS: "Back when I was an engineer we saw it in mainframe computers where you’d make an invention and frequently initially the software wasn’t fast enough to be able to run the algorithm. So the algorithm would first be built in silicon, really expensive, but you’d wind up then fabbing up chips to be special purpose chips to run the algorithm. And then later as the software got faster the underlying computer systems got faster you’d reimplement the same algorithm in software, same algorithm, same invention but just reimplement it in software and then even later after that when the ASIC density got good enough you’d reimplement yet again in an application-specific integrated circuit, an ASIC. And so you’d have a little bit of a hybrid, if you will, but more on the hardware side, it’s an IC. It’s again putting the algorithm in a chip. And so what you’d see by looking at that is that it made no sense to say that an algorithm was patentable if it was implemented in a hardware chip. But the same algorithm implemented in software was unpatentable. Just didn’t make sense to say that."
The post It makes no sense for an algorithm to be unpatentable simply because it is implemented in software appeared first on IPWatchdog.com | Patents & Patent Law.