Just a thought... I remember from the CII (software patent) Directive war that many politicians didn't understand the fundamental asymmetries involved in patenting and were deliberately misled by the pro-software patent side on this point: if you allow software patents in your own country you aren't helping your home-grown businesses (which will still be free to get software patents in the US etc. if they need to, no matter what you decide) - you're much more likely hurting them by helping the rest of the world to exclude them even from their own home markets. One MEP who did understand, IIRC, was a Scottish MEP who saw the analogy with allowing the big European fishing fleets access to Scottish waters. Small businesses tended not to understand the patent system and its asymmetries very well either and, ironically, would often go along with what the large company-led industry groups and individual large companies said. Unfortunately, rather like medicine and medical science - and for similar reasons - patent practice and patent system economics are plagued by quackery and pseudoscience and it is sometimes very hard to persuade people that software patents are bad economic medicine. Although we 'won' in the 'end', this: http://web.archive.org/web/20051230185631/http://www.researchineurope.or... was pretty much ignored by most of the members of our European Parliament, but perhaps your politicians are a little smarter. :)