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Software Patents in Europe and the UK

Written from EPC Article 52, T 0641/00 (COMVIK) and Aerotel/Macrossan. Current as of 22 August 2026.

Read the limits of this section before the content. Everything else on this site is written about United States law, and this site has no practitioner in the loop in any jurisdiction. It has no European practitioner at all. These pages report what the authorities say. They are the thinnest ground here, and anything that matters should go to a European or UK attorney rather than to a page.
The short version

European practice on software is usually described as a flat prohibition, and the article does not say that. Programs for computers are listed among things not regarded as inventions, and then a third paragraph confines the exclusion to applications relating to that subject matter as such. Two words carry the whole thing.

The United Kingdom applied the same exclusions by a different route until February 2026, when its Supreme Court set that route aside and aligned with the EPO reading. Both are below.

Article 52 has three paragraphs and they do different work.

Paragraph 1 grants European patents for inventions in all fields of technology that are new, involve an inventive step, and are susceptible of industrial application.

Paragraph 2 lists what is not regarded as an invention. Programs for computers appear there, in the same clause as "schemes, rules and methods for performing mental acts, playing games or doing business."

Paragraph 3 then limits paragraph 2 to applications relating to that subject matter "as such."

So the exclusion is a shape rather than a subject. Paragraph 2 does not declare software unpatentable; it withholds the label invention, and paragraph 3 confines that withholding to claims directed at the excluded thing as such. Whether a given claim is so directed is the whole question, and it is not answered by the article.

The Authorities

COMVIK Europe does not throw out an invention because part of it is a business idea. It does something more consequential. Read the Page Aerotel, superseded The four-step approach governed UK practice for two decades. The Supreme Court set it aside in February 2026 and aligned the UK with the EPO. Read the Page Further technical effect Assessed without reference to the prior art, so being faster than an earlier program is not itself a further technical effect. Read the Page UK Patents Act s.1 The statute states the exclusion and has not changed. The method for reading its as-such limit changed in February 2026, when the Supreme Court set Aerotel aside. Read the Page

What These Pages Do Not Decide

Nothing here says whether anything is patentable in Europe or the United Kingdom. Both pages below describe frameworks that are applied to facts by people qualified in those jurisdictions. Neither is a procedure a reader can run.
  • They do not compare United States and European outcomes for any particular invention.
  • They do not tell anyone how to frame or draft a claim for either office. Describing how an analysis works is not the same as drafting toward it.
  • They are not a substitute for European or UK counsel, and this site has neither.

Educational, not legal advice, and further from home than anything else on this site.

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