Paul Carlyle, a partner at commercial law firm Shepherd & Wedderburn specialising in intellectual property and telecommunications law, writes in the Scotsman: "The European Commission consultation on patenting software, published last year, revealed most to be against any extension of patents to business methods. Even the draft Software Patent Directive, currently being finalised, seeks simply to codify the current position rather than extend patent protection."

Paul Meller over at InfoWorld likewise seems to think that Arlene McCarthy and her JURI committee have settled "on a position that ignores views from both extremes of the debate over software patents, and endorses the approach to patentability currently applied by the European Patent Office." He also says, "The European Parliament is likely to support a law that permits software patents but limits their application to inventions that have a technical effect outside of just a computer program. A program could only be patented if it runs in conjunction with some sort of device such as an intelligent household appliance or a mobile phone." That's one interpretation of the language but the concern of opponents of the measure is that it does not read exactly like that.

It seems that the intention of folk like MEP McCarthy is that the "technical effect" (or "technical solution" as it appears to have been called in JURI) doctrine apply to software patents, whereby the software can only be patented if in combination with a computer or other piece of hardware it can be considered to be a novel, useful and non-obvious invention. So the software can't be patented in isolation. The concern of McCarthy's opponents is that the technical effect notion is vague and in the case of software, if you can run it on a computer, it will have a technical effect. So any software that runs is thereby patentable. Speaking of running, I've got to and this saga is likely to.