Identifying Patentable Software in Europe - Drafting Tips & More

Introduction

Everyone knows that patenting software in Europe is tricky.

The European Patent Convention explains that ‘software as such’ is not ‘an invention’ and hence cannot be patented. Yet in practice many European patents are granted every year for inventions that involve software.

How do we reconcile these two pieces of information?

Clearly some software is patentable, but the question is how to identify this software in advance of incurring the time, effort, and cost of filing a European patent application.

This short new webinar is aimed at giving a practical guide to identifying software that is likely to be patentable in Europe, subject of course to the usual novelty and inventive step requirements.

You will gain an understanding in how to examine any arbitrary piece of software and assess its chances of being found patentable by the EPO. The webinar will also provide some practical drafting tips to help steer a patent application away from the exclusions at the EPO.

What You Will Learn

This webinar will cover the following:

• Software patentability at the EPO
• Key indicators in favour of a piece of software being found patentable by the EPO
• Key indicators against a piece of software being found patentable by the EPO
• Real world examples of European software patents, mapped to the key indicators
• Drafting tips, to help avoid the exclusions to patentability

This webinar was recorded on 5th May 2022