Martin Goetz, Who Received the First Software Patent, Dies at 93 35
Martin Goetz, who joined the computer industry in its infancy in the mid-1950s as a programmer working on Univac mainframes and who later received the first U.S. patent for software, died on Oct. 10 at his home in Brighton, Mass. He was 93. The New York Times: His daughter Karen Jacobs said the cause was leukemia. In 1968, nearly a decade after he and several other partners started the company Applied Data Research, Mr. Goetz received his patent, for data-sorting software for mainframes. It was major news in the industry: An article in Computerworld magazine bore the headline "First Patent Is Issued for Software, Full Implications Are Not Known." Until then, software had not been viewed as a patentable product, one that was bundled into hulking mainframes like those made by IBM. Ms. Jacobs said her father had patented his own software so that IBM could not copy it and put it on its machines.
"By 1968, I had been involved in arguing about the patentability of software for about three years," Mr. Goetz said in an oral history interview in 2002 for the University of Minnesota. "I knew at some point in time the patent office would recognize it." What Mr. Goetz called his "sorting system" is believed to have been the first software product to be sold commercially, and his success at securing a patent led him to become a vocal champion of patenting software. The programs that instruct computers on what to do, he said, were often as worthy of patents as the machines themselves. The issuance of Mr. Goetz's patent "helped managers, programmers and lawyers at young software firms feel as if they were forming an industry of their own -- one in which they were creating products that were potentially profitable and legally defensible as proprietary inventions," Gerardo Con Diaz, a professor of science and technology studies at the University of California, Davis, wrote in the 2019 book "Software Rights: How Patent Law Transformed Software Development." Further reading, from Slashdot archive: Recipient of First Software Patent Defends Them (2009).
"By 1968, I had been involved in arguing about the patentability of software for about three years," Mr. Goetz said in an oral history interview in 2002 for the University of Minnesota. "I knew at some point in time the patent office would recognize it." What Mr. Goetz called his "sorting system" is believed to have been the first software product to be sold commercially, and his success at securing a patent led him to become a vocal champion of patenting software. The programs that instruct computers on what to do, he said, were often as worthy of patents as the machines themselves. The issuance of Mr. Goetz's patent "helped managers, programmers and lawyers at young software firms feel as if they were forming an industry of their own -- one in which they were creating products that were potentially profitable and legally defensible as proprietary inventions," Gerardo Con Diaz, a professor of science and technology studies at the University of California, Davis, wrote in the 2019 book "Software Rights: How Patent Law Transformed Software Development." Further reading, from Slashdot archive: Recipient of First Software Patent Defends Them (2009).
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Hard work and innovation might as well.
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Goaetze (Score:2)
So he patented the goatse image?
Here's your chance to mod a goatse comment as informative
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Anything might happen
If only we had a seventy year live experiment to see how it might play out.
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I also run across people who work in jobs paying less than what they could otherwise earn. Greed doesn't drive everyone. Some people love being nurses for example. I see software engineers who stuck with the lower paying medical devices industry instead of going to a startup in the dotcom days. Here on slashdot, I'm sure there are a ton of readers who prefer programming, tinkering, designing, rather than moving up the corporate ladder or always going to the best paying nerd job locally.
Also, it's not gr
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No, recognition and peer respect take its place, along with the fun of doing really cool shit. The Inca were possibly the highest civilization on the planet at the turn of the 16th century, they had no writing and no money. There were royalty and priests with special status and higher standards of living (some of them ridiculously higher, like never wearing the same clothing twice), but below them an engineer or physician had a very similar standard of living to a farmer, miner or potter. They built the
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I was responding to your expectation that "hard work and innovation" would suffer without monetary compensation, my example was just to show that wasn't necessarily true.
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Seems to drive everything. If everyone made the same $$$ or we made hoarding it useless, Greed might be taken out of the equation. Ego is just who we are.
Everyone making the same $$$ still leaves the base problem. $$$ can be used for trade and some bastard will find a way to horde it.
Aside from people screaming communist at the very thought, I don't think leaving money in the system is going to eliminate greed. We'd have to step a few rungs up the ladder of enlightenment, and everybody's way too scared of philosophical heights to ever let that happen.
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Some employers used to provide room and board in exchange for the labor. So one could perhaps see an analogue there today. The snag though is that not everyone can work, and not everyone can work at all ages. So the money gets saved up for the retirement or as a safety net too. The money is just an imperfect analogue for value of labor and we really haven't found a suitable alternative that doesn't have unacceptable drawbacks.
Not supposed to be able to patent math (Score:5, Interesting)
Software patents are evil, and while I'm sure someone else would've pushed the idea through if this guy hadn't, I don't see any reason to celebrate his life or mourn his death.
Re:Not supposed to be able to patent math (Score:5, Insightful)
I have always opposed them, and found no value at all in allowing the patenting of software -- but believe that such patents could be useful if they disclosed real valuable techniques not otherwise evident that would require substantial effort to develop and would otherwise not appear in the literature and are not based on algorithms (mathematics). But I know of no patents fitting that description. In all fairness the problems with software patents as they exist overlaps heavily with the problems with the patent system as a whole today -- now operating as a tool to hinder innovation with worthless patents designed to block competition.
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So this particular "first" patent. It was a tricky nut to crack. Not enough hardware to make modern software work. You can't sort in place because the data can't fit into the computer's memory. But lets say you design this sorting method and implement it in hardware directly. Vacuum tubes or transistors, it's real physical stuff. Is that patentable? Now say, you take this hardware implementation and put it into an CPLD, fuse the gates so it's locked and not programmable, so now it's still hardware but
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This conversation you're having, where you're pretending to ask me questions, and pretending I say yes along the way, and pretending to drag me into an interesting conclusion... none of that is real. This kind of argument strategy didn't really work even when Plato did it.
I was employed by a company that put multiple patents in my name, I've worked with patent attorneys, and I've spent significant time in a federal court dealing with a patent infringement law suit. I would happily discard the entire pate
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Sorry, I tend to have these "you" and questions directed to slashdot readership as a whole, not always the direct message I'm responding to.
Re:Not supposed to be able to patent math (Score:4, Informative)
The purpose of a patent is to exchange a limited monopoly right in exchange for disclosure. I am still waiting to get the first scrap of useful information from a software patent disclosure. 100,000 software patents and I've yet to see a useful disclosure in a single one of them.
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Yes and no. Some software patents are clever and novel. However these days the vast majority of software patents, and patents in general(!), are for the purposes of legal defense ("if you sue us over your patents, then we'll sue you over these"). And huge numbers of those non-software patents aren't really novel either, some are rather obvious ideas that many in an industry already used prior to the patent,
You could say that one shouldn't be able to patent an algorithm because that's essentially just a m
Until then, software had not been viewed... (Score:1)
... as a patentable product.
And still isn't in many parts of the world. For pretty much the same reasons mentioned by ~crunchygranola
The sad part is, (Score:2)
Terrible precedent. (Score:5, Insightful)
Copyright, maybe. patent: hell no. MIght as well say Stephen King could patent his books.
Why don't we honor the occasion (Score:3)
Re:Why don't we honor the occasion (Score:4)
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Numbers have been patented. For example in QAM cellular signals there are 2^N patterns you can pick from. I believe there is a US patent on the number 43 patenting the particular QAM encoding used on US cell networks. So if you want to build a cell phone in the US you have to license the number 43. Of course this patent is filled with gobbledygook saying why 43 is better than 47, but it really doesn't make any difference. It is just a way to extract licensing fees.
Thanks for nothing (Score:3)
Allowing software patents was *stupid*.
"the cause was leukemia" (Score:1)
Arguably the cause was being 93, exacerbated by leukemia
We won't miss him much... (Score:2)
Good riddance !
I don't like software patents (Score:2)
and I've noticed quit a few here who would love to curse his memory.
But he's the wrong target. He submitted the first software patent in the United States. Unfortunately, the software patent horse escaped the barn earlier via the British patent by British Petroleum.
i know where that asshole can rot (Score:2)
that’s all.