Original: http://www.heckel.org/Heckel/ACM%20Paper/patcprit.htm

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Patents & Copyrights

Kahin says, "Never before has an industry in which copyright was widely established suddenly been subjected to patenting"[25]

In fact, patent protection for software was established before copyright protection. Diamond v. Diehr (1981) preceded the two most important software copyright cases, Apple Computer v. Franklin Computer Company (1982) and SAS Institute Inc. v. S&H Computer Systems Inc. (1985). Even today the case law on user interface copyrights is sparse. Software, or "computer-related" patents were obtained in the 1960s. Martin Goetz of Applied Data Research received U.S. patents 3,380,029 in 1968 on a Sorting System, and 3,533,086 in 1970 on AutoFlow, an automatic flow charting program. (When IBM started giving Roscoe, a flowcharting program, away free , Applied Data Research sued for antitrust and and, in 1969, settled for about about $2 million in damages.) The recalculation patent filed in 1970 was granted in 1983

(Last updated on 10/06/98)

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