Occasionally, there is some positive news: European Parliament says no to software patents. However:
Now the European Patent Office must be democratized so that software patents are no longer granted in Europe without legal basis. And we must ensure that software patents are not introduced through some other back door, such as the efforts for a common EU patent.
That is the problem - we must be extremely careful that the same thing is not now attempted through other means. I do not believe that the EU Council will simply abandon its ideas, on the contrary, I suspect that it is now evading to other solutions. Therefore, I would have preferred an adopted patent directive with the intended changes rather than the general rejection, because the topic is still open. And ultimately, a directive with clear definitions could have helped prevent pure software patents, for example, to remove patents like the MP3 patent - because after all, there are already quite a number of pure software patents in Europe, and these must be eliminated somehow.