Commission trilatérale

OMPI	Trilatérale	AIPPI

The Hidden Patent Agenda of the European Commission: Jean-Paul Smets writes in spring 2000: The European Commission's Directorate for the Internal Market has built a consistent network of fallacies to argue in favour of software patents. It is closely following a new proprietarist ideology championed by the United States government. Expect the Directorate to push patents on intellectual methods in the near future.
die Trilaterale Kommission der Patentämter: Includes comparative reports of the three Patent Offices
Saikine 2000: Comparative Study of Software Examination Practise of EPO, JPO and USPTO: A study, based on example patents, on how the world's three most important patent offices evaluate claims related to software, mathematics and business methods. It appears from this that they are basically the same, but the EPO is slightly more willing to grant broad and trivial software patents than the other two offices.
OEB 2000-05-19: Examen des Applications pour Méthodes d'Affaires: The EPO document which introduced the term "computer-implemented invention". This is Appendix 6 of a report in which the EPO explains to the US and Japanese Patent Office to what extent it has made progress in working around the European Patent Convention so as to make business methods patentable in Europe. This document became the basis of the European Commission's software patentability directive proposal of 2002/02/20.
INPI.pt Documento de Consulta 2003/07/28: The Portuguese Patent Office explains its support for the European Commission's directive approach:
Consideramos, também, equilibrada a posição harmonizada dos Institutos de patentes dos Estados Unidos, do Japão e do Instituto Europeu de Patentes relativamente aos critérios de apreciação da patenteabilidade dessas invenções (voir Trilateral Technical Meeting Study, Tokyo, June 2000), para os quais são necessárias características técnicas para que um método de negócio implementado por um computador possa ser considerado patenteável (estas características técnicas, relacionadas com o computador, têm que ser expressas nas reivindicações, de acordo com os Institutos japonês e europeu, enquanto que para o Instituto americano basta que essas características estejam implicitamente expressas nas reivindicações).