Will the lack of commonality have a negative impact on the EU sofware market?
Maybe a little, maybe not at all. To date, there has never been commonality of patent law in the EU. This Directive was the first attempt at it, and nobody on either side was particularly interested in commonality. But maybe the question was: Will the rejection of the Directive have a negative impact on the EU sofware market? No. There will be almost no effect, if there is an effect it will be a slight positive one because the Directive, in it’s original form would have introduced software patents, and by rejecting it, the Parliament has become yet another body (along with the national courts) who do not agree with the European Patent Office. The effect will be positive because this gives software developers a little bit more assurance that they don’t have to worry about litigation from patent owners – but the impact of the effect will be slight or zero because the EP, like the national courts, does not have power on it’s own to discipline or fix the behaviour of the European Patent Of
