Editing Binary-coded decimal (section)

==Legal history==
In the 1972 case ''[[Gottschalk v. Benson]]'', the [[U.S. Supreme Court]] overturned a [[United States Court of Customs and Patent Appeals|lower court]]'s decision that had allowed a [[patent]] for converting BCD-encoded numbers to binary on a computer.

The decision noted that a patent "would wholly pre-empt the mathematical formula and in practical effect would be a patent on the [[algorithm]] itself".<ref name="Gottschalk-Benson_1972" /> This was a landmark judgement that determined the [[Software patents under United States patent law|patentability of software and algorithms]].