Compliance Toolkit

Story: Commission refuses to rewrite patent directive

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"CIID" is an insult too

A "computer implemented invention" is as pure a software solution as a software solution can get, and by saying that it is an Invention in the sense of patent law, you subscribe to the partisan view of the Commission on this matter.

Please don't make up short forms for this directive which contain the word "CII". There is no official shorthand and the one most used is "software patents directive" or "softpat directive". That's the term that has been circulating at the Commission as well as at the EP since 1997.

If the software patents directive is referred backt to the Parliament after a round of scrutiny by the other DGs (not Internal Market only), it may well be renamed. Everybody detests the "CII" name, even EICTA says it is badly named.

If the goal is not patentability of pure software, then "computer-assisted inventions" would be appropriate. When the means of implementation is a computer, the "invention" can only be software (as such), and that is how the term was actually defined by in 2000 by the EPO, when it was introduced. The same definition was incorporated in the Commission's draft in 2002. It is a word that implies a pro-software-patent credo. Please don't force your readers to recite this credo all the time.

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