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European Software Patent Statistics This project aims to create tabular listings and statistics of the software patents 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.

	European Commission wants Unlimited Patentability! Directive Draft by BSA
	Counter-Proposal
	Call for Action

How it was done Patent Lists, sorted by Software Patent Probability Statistics How it was done The difficulty is that there is no explicit identification for software related patents. Therefore we had to download all patents which matched certain keywords like internet, server, client or virtual into a database. Then we assigned each patent a probability of being a software patent, again by checking for keywords in the title and abstract. Words related to algorithms and programming raised the probability, those related to physical or mechanical things lowered it. This has led to a fairly high score rate, but still you will occasionally encounter a true hardware patent. Patent Lists, sorted by Software Patent Probability As most browsers are slow with very big tables, there is a choice between the lists in HTML tables and plain text. All patents are granted by the EPO, you can validate this by following the link under the patent number on each patent and checking for the B1-document in the row "Requested Patent". plain text HTML Compression Top 100 Top 100 -- Top 1000 Top 1000 -- Top 10000 Top 10000 zip Statistics Country Statistics Company Statistics