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There were two issues before the court. First was the matter of whether or not the subject matter of the patent was patentable—the examiner and the board had claimed that the patent was for algorithms and thus unpatentable. Second, the court had to decide whether or not the fact that the patent did
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In 1975, John
Sherwood filed a patent for an invention referred to as "Continuous Automatic Migration of Seismic Reflection Data with Waveform Preservation." The invention involved using a computer to measure and analyze seismological data. The patent application was initially rejected on two
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The court reversed the decision of the board on both grounds, finding that there was more to the patent claim than just algorithms and that source code disclosure was unnecessary, as someone "skilled in the art" could write the necessary source code.
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