Can someone just shut this man up.

AAAAAaaaarrgggh well he's back. It's our man Charlie McCreevy and with his winning ways he wants to restart the whole issue of European Patenting. The whole shebang kicks off this time with a consulation document (available from here).

Commissioner McCreevy has stated his intention to make one final effort to have the
proposal adopted during his mandate.

Well so just one last one then. Go on, go on, go on.

So the text seems noddy enough. "Would you approve of a pan-european patenting system" - sure, provided you cannot patent software. "Do you think there should be a single european patent dispute process should exist" - sure, provided software patents attempts always fail.

O.K. this is re-framing the debate on the Community Patent (i.e. a pan-european one vs the national ones we have at the moment)... but could this be a stalking horse for software patentability. It'll be interesting to see how the vested interests stack up, always telling. Last time round, they all stacked up as you would expect (apart from the icky ISA), then it looked like the directive might actually get through with sensible ammendments, so both sides decided to scupper it.

Also this comes just days after a UK judge has questioned whether we need software patents at all. Good to see the "why are we giving these guys a monopoly" meme is percolating up the stack.