Software patents in the UK

Posted Feb 28, 2007 2:09 UTC (Wed) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]

Yes. Don't take this at face value. The situation in the UK is not too bad, with some helpful rulings recently, but we do have some pretty terrible patents and by definition EPO-issued patents where the applicant ticked the 'UK' box are also valid in the UK.

The last major appeal-court case allowed some telephone billing software to be patented because it 'made a new network arrangement' and that counts as hardware.

Copying pointers instead of data (when emulating a CPU) is patented by ARM . WHich I suspect is the same as this US patent.

Another recent dumb example was a RISC java bytecode patent. Very definately software, but because it was a 'virtual machine' that made it patentable.

It could be worse, but it could also be a great deal better.