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...
Re:H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)
by speedgoose on Monday July 06, 2020 @10:30AM
(#23748262)
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.
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).