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The European Patent Office (EPO) has, in contradiction to the letter and spirit of the written law, granted tens of thousands of patents on programming and business ideas, below termed "software patents".
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The European Comission (CEC) is pressing ahead to legalise these patents and make them enforcable in all of Europe. In doing so, it is disregarding the manifest will and well-argued reasoning of the vast majority of software professionals, software companies, computer scientists and economists.
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The CEC is basing its proposal on a draft which was apparently written by Business Software Alliance (BSA), a US based organisation dominated by a few big vendors, such as Microsoft.
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Software patents interfere with software copyright and tend to lead to the expropriation of software creators rather than to a protection of their property. Of numerous existing economic studies, none concludes that software patents lead to more productivity, innovation, knowledge diffusion or are in any other way macro-economically beneficial. Software patentability, as proposed by CEC/BSA, moreover leads to various inconsistencies within the patent system and invalidates central assumptions on which it is built. As a result, anything becomes patentable and there can no longer be any legal security.
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The institutions of the European patent system are not in any meaningful way subjected to democratic control. The division between legislative and judicial powers is insufficient, and in particular the EPO seems to be a breeding ground for abusive and illegal practices.