Martin Goetz, who received the first software patent, dies at 93

“I knew that at some point the patent office would recognize” computer software, he said. This happened in 1968, helping to ignite the software market.

Martin Goetz, who joined the computer industry in its early days in the mid-1950s in as a programmer working on Univac mainframes. and who later received the first U.S. patent for software, died October 10 at his home in Brighton, Massachusetts. He was 93 years old.

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 mainframe computers. This was major industry news: an article in Computerworld magazine headlined: “First patent issued for software, full implications not known. »

Until then, software had not been considered a patentable product and was integrated into large mainframe computers like those manufactured by IBM. Ms. Jacobs said her father patented his own software so IBM couldn't copy it and put it on its machines.

"In 1968, I was involved in disputes over software patentability for about three years," Mr. Goetz said in a 2002 oral history interview for the University of Minnesota. "I knew that at some point the patent office would recognize it."

What Mr. Goetz called his "sorting system" would have been the first software product to be sold commercially, and its success in Obtaining a patent led him to become a strong advocate of software patenting. Programs that tell computers what to do, he said, often deserved as many patents as the machines themselves. same.

The granting of Mr. Goetz's patent “helped managers, programmers and lawyers of young software companies feel like they were creating their own industry, an industry in which they create products that are potentially profitable and legally defensible as proprietary inventions,” Gerardo Con Díaz, 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.”

ImageM. Goetz patented his own software so IBM couldn't copy it and put it on its machines, his daughter Karen Jacobs said.Credit... U.S. Patent 3380029

Robin Feldman, a professor at the University of California San Francisco law school, said by telephone: "The world we live in today, with app stores and software invented in the garage of someone, honors Goetz's vision, scientific innovation and dogged perseverance. ."

(Global software market revenues were about $610 billion in 2022, according to Statista, a data and business intelligence company.)

Mr. Goetz and his company took the next step in opening up the software market. In April 1969, Applied Data Research filed an antitrust lawsuit against IBM, accusing it of having illegally set a single price for its equipment and software – essentially to give...