AFTER years of fierce lobbying, politicking and legislative battles, one of the most divisive and acrimonious disputes within the European Union has been resolved. It wasn’t about farm subsidies, budgets or foreign policy: it was about patenting software.
On 6 July, members of the European parliament voted 648 to 14 to abandon plans to introduce a law that would have allowed companies to patent computer-implemented inventions, which in practice mainly means functions performed by software.
Large software companies supported the law, arguing that software patents would encourage research and defend European inventions from American competition. Small firms and the open…
