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Contested Ontologies of Software: The Story of Gottschalk v. Benson, 1963–1972
- IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
- IEEE Computer Society
- Volume 38, Number 1, January-March 2016
- pp. 23-33
- 10.1353/ahc.2016.0003
- Article
- Additional Information
Abstract
In 1972, the US Supreme Court ruled in Gottschalk v. Benson that a computer program developed at Bell Laboratories was ineligible for patent protection. This article argues that the history of Gottschalk v. Benson turned on a series of “ontological contests”—that is, clashes among actors who advanced mutually incompatible conceptions of the nature of software.
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