EU Closer To Rejecting Software Patents

niekko writes "BusinessWeek is reporting on the hot subject of European software patent directive. 'The European Parliament moved Tuesday toward rejecting a proposed law creating a single way of patenting software across the European Union, officials said -- a move that would effectively kill the legislation since lawmakers do not plan to set forth a new version.'"

Comments

Killing this directive is dangerous.

[Gadzinka]

Killing this directive is very dangerous since pro-patent lobbyists have already stated on record, that they want the directive in current shape or not at all.

If the directive doesn't pass, they can still lobby individual governments.

If the directive passes in castrated form with provisions preventing pure software and business method patents, member countries won't be able to enact legislation permitting it.

So, what we, Europeans, really want is for the directive to pass in a form that once and for all prevents this abomination called software patents to be reborn.

Robert

Wait! The headline is wrong

[Klact-oveeseds-tene]

What would be rejected is the proposed EU directive harmonizing the national laws on software patents. Even without such a law, thousands of software patents have been granted by the European Patent Office, by bending the exclusion of the patentability of "software as such". Judges are likely to interpret the law similarly.

Software patents do exist in Europe and the only way to make them invalid is a directive that effectively excludes software from patentability. So the rejection of the proposed (pro-softpat) text does not really solve the problem.