decoration decoration
Stories

GROKLAW
When you want to know more...
decoration
For layout only
Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines
ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


You won't find me on Facebook


Donate

Donate Paypal


No Legal Advice

The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.


What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments


Sponsors

Hosting:
hosted by ibiblio

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster
... in theory. In practice EU allows SW patents. | 400 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
... in theory. In practice EU allows SW patents.
Authored by: SLi on Saturday, May 12 2012 @ 06:53 PM EDT

The EPO would beg to disagree.

The official position is that software "as such" is not patentable. Therefore you just have to get around that by reciting a computer loaded with that software, and suddenly you are not patenting software "as such". The EPO, and the patent offices of many (but not all) European countries, will happily grant you the patent.

Furthermore, sometimes physical effect comes into the play. The EPO considers the arrangement of electron flows inside the computer's CPU sufficient physical effect.

Another really weird argument is that which allows you to patent a storage medium with some software on it. To get a patent, it needs to be a) novel and nonobvious; b) technical in nature (this possibly doesn't mean what it seems to mean, but that it needs to be something... physical, or a process). But in EPO's opinion it's enough that the stored software is novel while it's not physical, and that the storage medium is physical while it's not novel. That's right - the novelty and the physicality need not be in the same place.

If you are not confused enough yet, sometimes the results of national courts kind of filter into the interpretations (but generally only if it's good for software patents). I remember one case where a national decision, which I think allowed a certain software patent, was so confusing that it caused some head- scratching. While the decision itself allowed software patents, the resulting position paper (in an EPO query to member nations as to how patent law should be interpreted re: software patents) was simply so utterly confused that it's hard to say whether it was for or against software patents in general.

The paper in question, by the UK, argued something like this (and it might well be that the author understood it made no sense, but was obligated to follow the high court):

Software should generally not be patentable, unless it transforms the computer in some useful way, like making it run faster or freeing up more memory for programs.

Now that's wrong on so many levels it's hard to know where to begin...

But to recap, unfortunately, software patents are a reality in (at least most of the) EU. You have been misled.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by the individual posters.

PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )