A battle royal has developed over the protection of software inventors' rights in the European Union. A draft directive on "the patentability of computer-implemented inventions", designed more to harmonise than radically alter patent enforcement around Europe, has pitted the European Parliament, which has vainly sought to get the Commission to ditch its draft directive, against the EU Council of Ministers, which yesterday backed the measure. It has also created a big confrontation between big hi-tech companies and smaller developers of open source software, with each claiming the other is trying to stifle innovation.

This overblown affair stems essentially from the recent tendency of the European Patent Office to follow the pernicious US practice of issuing patent protection not only to new software applications, but also to pure software, such as algorithms, and so-called business methods such as Amazon's one-click payment process; while ingenious, this hardly counts as a genuinely new invention. Almost everyone agreed that the EPO was being too generous in granting such patents, and even the new patent holders felt frustrated because many national courts in the EU refused to enforce their patents.