Steve Stites

That is because some lawyers confused the U.S. Supreme Court into thinking that an HVAC control program is an integral component of the computer it ran on. Technically that claim is absurd but the Supreme Court ruled that all software which is an integral component of the hardware is patentable as part of the hardware.

As you say the lawyers have to draft the patent to claim that the software is an integral component on the machine it runs on. This has lead to the absurd, and expensive, situation where technically no software is an integral component of a computer and legally all software is an integral component of a computer.

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Steve Stites

"And software is made up of mathematical algorithms, n’est-ce
pas? "

I have a degree in Mathematics and I have written programs off and on for over 25 years. Rob Tiller's statement is so obvious to me that I cannot see how anybody could think otherwise. But the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled on several software patent cases over the years without just cutting off the logic creating software patents at the root by stating that software is not patentable because software is made up of algorithms.

I think that we should find a legal test case for a software patent that is obviously an algorithm even to an intelligent layman. Then we should go to court and keep appealing the verdict until some court, preferably the U.S. Supreme Court, rules that computer software is not patentable because it is algorithms.

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Steve Stites