There is no other way to interpret the lies about the position of the Ministry of Economic Affairs on the patent directive. There is a clear and unanimous resolution of the Bundestag. But the Ministry of Economic Affairs shits on the opinion of the parliament as well as the experts.
By the way, the given example of "time and space-saving data storage" is exactly what indicates the problems: there have always been problems with patents on compression algorithms that de facto sealed formats for use in open source programs - which is a considerable obstacle to the interoperability that is being discussed everywhere. Microsoft would only have to store the XML formats in a proprietary binary XML format and could thus prevent, by patent, open source software in Europe from reading the documents.
Other - older - examples of exactly this problem are GIF storage and the LZW algorithm. Both have caused massive problems with interoperability and exactly that is what we will also face in Europe with the current directive.
The claim of the Ministry of Economic Affairs that there is nothing to fear is therefore nothing more than a stupid and transparent lie. Ultimately, the federal government is playing into the hands of the industry giants here, and at the expense of the middle class and open source software.
More on this, as usual, at the FFII.