Diamond v. Diehr, 450 U.S. 175 (1981), was a 1981 U.S. Supreme Court decision which held that controlling the execution of a physical process, by running a computer program did not preclude patentability of the invention as a whole. The high court reiterated its earlier holdings that mathematical formulas in the abstract could not be patented, but it held that the mere presence of a software element did not make an otherwise patent-eligible machine or process un-patentable. Diehr was the third member of a trilogy of Supreme Court decisions on the patent-eligibility of computer software related inventions.
Read more about Diamond V. Diehr: The Supreme Court's Opinion, The Patent
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