German High Court Declares All Software Patentable

FlorianMueller writes "Long gone are the times when Europe was that bastion of resistance against software patents and patents on such things as file systems were ruled invalid. In a decision published today, the Federal Court of Justice of Germany upheld a patent on the automatic generation of structured documents (such as XML/HTML) in a client-server setting. The ruling lays out general principles that go beyond the patent at stake: they tear down all barriers to software patentability in the largest EU member state, even though a European patent treaty has been adopted that was intended to exclude software from the scope of patentable subject matter. EU patent examiners recently warned against a drift toward software patents. Software patent critics in Europe fear this will spark more litigation on their continent and increasingly call for defensive measures."

Comments

More info on swpat.org

[ciaran_o_riordan]

I'm working on documenting this, and the general German situation, here:

• Xa ZB 20/08 (2010, April, Germany) (that's this case)
• German patent courts and appeals
• Case law in Germany

swpat.org is a publicly editable wiki, help welcome.

Re:Boycott Germany

[TheRaven64]

Munich is the site of one of the largest Linux deployments in the world, so it makes more sense to tell them that they are (about to be) operating illegally than to tell Berlin, which is a much smaller user of GPL'd code.