European Software Patent Statistics
Figures gathered in 2001-2004
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This project aims to create tabular listings and statistics of the patents on programming tasks for the universal computer which the European Patent Office has been granting against the letter and spirit of the written law for the last few years. For reasons explained below, it is difficult to find out the precise number, but it seems the EPO must have granted at least 20-30,000 software patents before 2005. |
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The difficulty is that there is no explicit identification for software related patents. Therefore we had to download and scan all patents, so as to assign each patent a probability of being a software patent. Expressions related to algorithms and programming raised the probability, those related to forces of nature lowered it. This has led to a fairly high score rate, but still you will occasionally encounter a true hardware patent.
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