In a vote expected to bury the bill, the European parliament yesterday rejected the software patents directive. MEPs thereby preserved the status quo, an outcome that does not hand victory to any of the protagonists in the three-year legislative battle. Leaving it at that, however, would be feeble.

The directive started out as an attempt to adopt a common European standard on the patentability of software that would apply to national patent offices as well as the Munich-based European Patent Office. The law would have granted patent protection to software inventions that were new, non-obvious and made a technical contribution - a standard that the EPO was seen as having slipped below.