Today, there is almost nothing that works without Software and the Internet. In many areas, technical development even takes place exclusively in the field of Software. How does today’s patent law deal with this development?

The purpose of patent law is to promote technical progress by granting inventors a temporary monopoly right as a reward for disclosing their invention. A look at the past shows how this works.

When modern patent law emerged in Europe at the end of the 19th century, an enormous development in technical mechanics was underway. Machines of all kinds were being developed to produce energy, process materials and much more. Patent law was intended to promote this technological progress by providing inventors with temporary protection against imitations.

In the second half of the 20th century, a development began that is still continuing today. A wide variety of programmable computers have been developed that can be used to control production facilities, aircraft, telecommunications systems, etc. The organization and evaluation of business-related data has also been taken over by electronics in many respects: Accounting programs, word processing software, text analysis tools and financial investment software have all made inroads.

However, the European Patent Convention now prohibits the protection of “computer programs as such”. Does this prohibition mean that modern technical development trends are bypassed by patent law?

Read more about this in grips 2016/3