Contested Ontologies of Software: The Story of Gottschalk v. Benson, 1963-1972

In 1972, the US Supreme Court issued Gottschalk v. Benson, one of the most prominent decisions in the history of software patenting. It ruled that a computer program developed at Bell Laboratories by Gary Benson and Arthur Tabbot was ineligible for patent protection. This article argues that the journey of Benson and Tabbot's program through the patent system from 1963 to 1972 consists of a series of "ontological contests"--that is, clashes between attorneys and federal agents who proposed mutually incompatible conceptions of the nature of software, each one designed to serve as a philosophical underpinning for patent law. This argument invites a new historical approach to the study of the history of software patenting, one that reveals how the nature of computer programs as technologies and inventions was shaped by public administrators, judges, corporate attorneys, and trade associations.