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Patenting software in ROM

Revision as of 06:14, 24 November 2010 by Ezadetedek (talk | contribs)

In the UK

In the UK, this approach was rejected in the Gale case. This was described by the judge in the High Court Symbian case:<ref>http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Patents/2008/518.html</ref>

<blockquote> The program was loaded into the ROM of the computer and the claim was for the circuitry of the ROM loaded with the program so as to enable the computer to calculate square roots in this new way. The Court of Appeal held (applying the reasoning in Merrill Lynch) that if the program was not patentable it could not be saved merely by incorporating it into some form of carrier whether a computer or (in those days) a floppy disk. </blockquote>

In the USA

In the 70s in the USA, software developers sometimes patented software ideas by burning their software onto a chip such as a ROM chip and claiming that combination.

This was used to patent the "setuid" feature of Unix.

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References