The holder of the first software patent dies
Martin Goetz, the owner of the first software patent, died a few days ago at his home, in Brighton, Massachusetts, at the age of 93, after a battle with leukemia.
Goetz joined the computer industry in its infancy in the mid-1950s as a programmer working on Univac mainframes, and later obtained the first U.S. patent for software.
In 1968, nearly a decade after establishing Applied Data Research, Goetz and several other partners obtained a patent for his invention, data sorting software for mainframes.
His daughter, Karen Jacobs, said that her father obtained a patent for his own program so that IBM could not copy it and put it on its devices. It is believed that what Goetz called his sorting system was the first software product to be sold commercially, and its success led to it obtaining... patent to become a clear champion of software patents.
The issuance of Goetz's patent helped managers, programmers and lawyers at young software companies feel that they constituted an industry of their own, profitable and legally defensible as proprietary inventions.
“The world we live in now, with its app stores and software invented, may have been thanks to Goetz's vision, scientific innovation and dogged perseverance,” said Robin Feldman, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco School of Law.
Goetz and his company took another step to open up the software market in April 1969. Goetz filed an antitrust lawsuit against IBM, accusing it of illegally setting one price for its equipment and software, and called for it to be broken up. In June of that year, IBM agreed M is on dismantling, according to what was reported by the Indian Express newspaper.