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Re:The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been te... by rawfan on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @07:39AM (#14245539)
Software patents are banned in Europe, so the whole shebang is really only relevant in the US. While the patent offices in Europe allowed software concepts to be patented, these patents are not enforcable.
Re:The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been te... by jordigh on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @10:51AM (#14246794)
The situation is a lot more nuanced than that. After all, this is a German company holding mp3 patents. While software itself is not patentable in Europe (or, for that matter, in the US; they argue that it's not software but a process or a "method and a device" that they are patenting), there is a lot of wiggling around the law that results in software patents still being applicable.

http://fsfe.org/campaigns/swpat/swpat.en.html