The Supreme Court doesn't understand software

Every single bit of physics is math at it's core. If you come up with a new physical theory you will be ignored unless you also include the math for it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_patent_law

By the 16th century, the English Crown would habitually grant letters patent for monopolies to favoured persons (or people who were prepared to pay for them).[13] This power was used to raise money for the Crown, and was widely abused, as the Crown granted patents in respect of all sorts of common goods (salt, for example). Consequently, the Court began to limit the circumstances in which they could be granted. After public outcry, James I of England was forced to revoke all existing monopolies and declare that they were only to be used for "projects of new invention". This was incorporated into the Statute of Monopolies in which Parliament restricted the Crown's power explicitly so that the King could only issue letters patent to the inventors or introducers of original inventions for a fixed number of years. It also voided all existing monopolies and dispensations with [some] exception[s]....

There has also been some historical research that suggests that the "Statute of Monopolies" was a political compromise[1]. There wasn't really a lot of thought about maximizing innovation or incentives, or whatever. However, I fully agree that the popular understanding of the patent system has more to do with incentives for innovation and disclosure. But any engineer will tell you there's far more optimal ways to explain technical devices and inventions than legalese and claims.

On a related note, the USSR had a patent system. With patents. Who would have thought? This stuff is super ingrained.

[1] http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/Generally%20inconvenient:%20...

Basic Lossless compression can function like this:

Imagine a string of 1's and 0's e.g. 10010000011000101111001

This string can be trivially compressed in a losses manor using this algo, every time the bit changes to a one or zeor, record the previous run of bits. So we would compress this string to look like: [1,1][0,2][1,1][0,5][1,2][0,3][1,1][0,1][1,4][0,2][1,1]

I understand now this is a terrible example however it is good enough here.

So since most/all compression algos are just using a pre-defined set of choices on how to compress data in either a lossless or lossy manor. The only difference between two compression algos would be their rules for what data to keep and how to arrange it more efficiently into a different data structure.

I think the analogy of board games can be used here. While you are free to get a trade mark on many aspects of your game, you can not patent the actual rules or game play. http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html

The rules and game play is what makes Risk different from mouse-trap.

Replace rules with compression algo (or any software algo...) and we come to the conclusion of software is not patentable.

So at what point does a collection of fundamental computer science concepts become patentable?

The line is completely arbitrary using the compressions algo example. I honestly have not been able to reason through a real life example that hold up to this scrutiny.

Maybe I am misinterpreting your answer, so if I am, I apologize, just ignore me =D

EDIT

Thanks to person for the discussion free down vote. Why engage when you can suppress.

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

It's clear from the historical record that this was about ensuring monetary compensation for invention, as knock-off devices were just as common then as they are now.

In fact, public access to patents was basically non-existent until the Patent Act of 1836. The "non-obvious" test came even later.