Why the Supreme Court’s software patent ban didn’t last

Forty years ago this week, in the case of Parker v. Flook, the US Supreme Court came close to banning software patents. "The court said, 'Well, software is just math; you can't patent math,'" said Stanford legal scholar Mark Lemley. As a result, "It was close to impossible in the 1970s to get software patents."

https://arstechnica.com/features/2018/06/why-the-supreme-courts-software-patent-ban-didnt-last/