Personally I've found European organizations and persons far more obsessed with patenting software and especially protocols than the US. One reason on the pers

Personally I've found European organizations and persons far more obsessed with patenting software and especially protocols than the US. One reason on the persons front is that it seems much more common to give employee engineer-inventors a share residual patent income, making them highly invested in seeing their patents deployed widely and enforced. Vs the US where its much more common for engineers to get a one time bonus. This idea that the EU is special in excluding patentability "programs for computers as such" is nonsense: The US does so as well (except for the decade between state and bilski).