Re: Business methods patents in national European offices

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

> Are there any national patent offices in Europe where it is possible
> to obtain GRANT of a patent - possibly a petty patent - for what is
> clearly a business method?  Never mind whether it is valid or not !

The offices of DE, FR, UK et al have granted quite a few that are clearly
business methods.  They also refuse some patents on the grounds of being
business methods.  It depends, e.g. on the examiners, on the claim wording
and even on temporary policies.  At the moment the policies seem to have
turned more against b.m. than 2 years ago, but such patents are
nevertheless still granted.

Some examples of EPO business method patents that were mostly transferred
to national patents are found at

        http://swpat.ffii.org/patents/samples/

If a process that consists only of elements of the turing machine (e.g.
storage, memory, i/o, connection etc) can be considered "technical" and
"not a comptuter program as such", we of course get not only lots of
illegal patents but also unavoidably some business method patents.
Turing machine processes are equivalent to algorithms, and algorithms are
abstractions of many things, including business methods.

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel. +49-89-12789608
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
120,000 signatures against software patents      http://www.noepatents.org/