From country to country around the world there are wide divergences in legislation and judicial rulings governing the patentability of computer software. In the United States, where the pertinent legislation has remained essentially the same since the late sixties when software began to assume commercial importance, a progression of court decisions handed down between 1972 and the present show an increasing tendency to reward software inventions with patents.
The most recent decision in this progression, State Street Bank and Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group (see Endnote 1) has been widely discussed, analyzed, criticized, lauded and otherwise scrutinized. Because its claim to fame -- apart from having emanated from the U.S. appellate court charged with hearing all appeals in patent cases, a court answerable only to the Supreme Court of the United States -- is that it abolishes an always somewhat shaky and less than consistently invoked maxim of U.S. patent law under
