The problem is that the meaning of "software as such" has been almost completely eroded over the past decades by the EPO and some national courts (including, in

The problem is that the meaning of "software as such" has been almost completely eroded over the past decades by the EPO and some national courts (including, in particular, the X. Civil Senate of the German Federal Court of Justice). "Software as such" used to be excluded because inventions were required to be technical, which meant that a patent had to teach a methodical use of controllable forces of nature that attained a goal based on cause and effect. The criterion of "being technical" predated "software as such", but the latter term was indeed intended to distinguish between pure software and combined software/hardware solutions, where the software was integral to the overall solution, reflecting previous exclusions of business methods, mathematics, etc. under the same criterion. What happened was that the "use of controllable forces of nature" got watered down incrementally until now practically anything that isn't defined in terms of a Turing Machine satisfies the criterion (sadly, I'm not really exaggerating much here). For example, anything that is designed to operate in finite (not even practically limited, just not infinite) memory can be argued to be related to managing resources and thus be technical. Any algorithm that is more efficient than another (uses less memory, is more cache-friendly, requires less I/O, etc.) is potentially technical. As a result, tying your algorithm to a device as an integral part of a combined hardware/software system is not really a necessity any longer. That does not mean that anything goes, but there are way too many patents relating to what developers (but not the EPO) think of as pure software solutions that are patented and which can trip you up. This is precisely what the German parliament is referring to when it complains that "in practice -- in particular by the European Patent Office (EPO) -- patents were granted for computer programs where the patent grant for teachings relating to pure data processing received only a formal disguise as a 'technical process' or 'technical device' and claims explicitly included also the computer programs implementing these processes or devices".