Software patents are a very complex thing.

For example, many countries in EU do not allow patents on software, but that's not something you can claim to be true for all of them - at least before Brexit, since iirc UK was pretty happy to provide software patents.

Then there's a case where if you're really willing you can, as far as I understand, force a patent dispute through WTO, with possibility of patent valid in USA being executed for example in Poland, despite the fact that the patent is invalid in Poland (it doesn't matter if your software is part of physical solution in Poland, algorithms of any kind are not patentable).

What really annoys me is that Article 52 of the EPC explicitly excludes software from patentability. It couldn't be more clear in its language (to me). But when I talked to a patent lawyer about this a while back he said didn't really mean that and software could and is easily patented.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_Eur...

One more benefit of the brexit for mainland Europe! I didn't know about using the WTO to dispute invalide patents. I guess a WTO dispute can make sense for a Boeing software patent used by Airbus. I wonder whether the WTO would care about an independent developer. It's not very good press, but perhaps it's fine for them.

WTO doesn't care, WTO serves as a forum to get it through.

The question is, does a "practicing entity" holding the patent cares enough to go through the hardest route to get the patent executed using WTO as a forum? One needs to compare costs and benefits. It's why patent trolling involved pretty much few counties in Texas, because that's where the costs were lowest compared to benefits.

It's not just the UK that allows software patents in practice - as the discussion hints at, Germany does too, and if I remember rightly pretty much the last patent affecting MP3 was a German patent on zero-padding held by Philips, who enforced it aggressively against manufacturers of devices like music players.

> Software patents aren't a thing in ~~Europe~~ a few European countries.

Look at all those European patents in the MPEG-LA license pool!

https://www.mpegla.com/wp-content/uploads/avc-att1.pdf

Software patents can exist, but are almost always unenforceable, is my understanding of it from researching this for my own media-related project.

> Software patents can exist, but are almost always unenforceable

Wanna take the risk? You might end-up winning the lawsuit, but at this moment, there's a good chance for you to be already out-of-business.

As I understand it there has been no successful enforcement of a software patent so far, and it's ridiculously unlikely that I (as opposed to any other actor in this space) will be the first case. So yeah, I'll take that risk.

I would love that you be right. However, here are examples of successfully enforced software patents:

- in Europe: http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2002/1702.html

- in US: https://web.archive.org/web/20061205050434/http://eolas.com/...

But as I said, if your startup is being sued by Dolby, whether the enforcement is successful or not is actually irrelevant. Showing that your work doesn't infringe a patent, or that Dolby's patent is invalid, is a money and time-consuming process (unsurprisingly, patents are not generally written to facilitate re-implementation or defense).

(Moreover, in the US, in some cases, the patent owner might even get a preliminary injunction ( https://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/jom/matters/matters-9712.h... ), which might seriously and immediately harm your business. I don't know if such a thing exists in Europe).

Big tech companies like Dolby and IBM use a preventive racket-looking technique ; it involves trying to sell to potential infringers a "protective" subscription, but there's no preliminary analysis of whether there actually is any patent being infringed.

During broadcasting tech events like IBC or NAB, Dolby actually sends people to other company's booths for this ; and there's a famous story about IBM against small-at-this-time SUN : https://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html , whose gist is:

> "OK," [the IBM lawyer] said, "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents.

> Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe?

> Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?"

I meant in Europe, and that case is not successful enforcement of a software patent (merely a preliminary question as to whether some jurisdiction weirdness could be a reason that William Hill did not infringe on a patent); in fact there was no question to the court as to whether the patent was valid, and the case ended with an answer to the question asked.

This is a quirk of some UK courts, where you can literally just start a case to ask a question on some detail of the law and get an answer.

The question was:

> "Is it a defence to the claim under s.60(2) of the Patents Act 1977, if otherwise good, that the host computer claimed in the patent in suit is not present in the UK, but is connected to the rest of the apparatus claimed in the patent."

From Wikipedia:

> Questions of validity were never considered by the court.

I think Europe does allow software patents of a sort: See https://www.epo.org/law-practice/legal-texts/html/guidelines... Or you might have a particular definition of the term in mind that excludes these, but I think when most folks here the term, they'd include what the EPO permits.

The European patent office is not an official thing. It's an independent private organization that will gladly take your money to submit patents.

The European Patent Organisation is an intergovernmental organisation (https://www.epo.org/about-us/foundation.html).

Not a private organization.

Alright, I was wrong. Still strange that they issue patents that are obviously invalid.

I know quite well a patent examiner there; there is a lot of politics and incompetence in appointing people and a lot of pressure to accept most of the patents they receive, if I understood correctly part of the reason is politics (if you refuse, even stupid patents, influential people will get upset) and part is the idea to have as many patents as possible as a measure of European creativity and innovation and ... bla-bla. Universities and research institutes are measured by the number of patents and if they don't invent something good, they will patent something stupid just to get the numbers right.

The reasoning is that individual states have Opinions about the validity of software patents and they're going to keep issuing them until somebody with the proper authority clarifies that the law means what the law says, although as far as I can tell none have actually been successfully enforced.

In practice, EU does allow software patents. The software invention just needs to be disguised as a machine. Industrial property lawyers know very well how to do that, and it's unfortunately very common.

> Edited because I didn't know that some European countries accept software patents.

European patents are granted at the European Patent Office (individual european countries also have their own patent offices, whose patents can only be enforced in their home country).

enforceability of EPO patents varies, that's why there was a big fight on software patents in EU parliament not so long ago, not sure however on current status - that needs to be checked I guess.