And, of course, any ambiguity will open up a loophole in the law sufficient to create a grey area, opening the way for software patenting.

The EPO has "raising the bar" as a strategy concerning its future workload, and patent offices in Europe should work together, e.g. by mutual exploitation of work to maintain high quality rights and avoid patents being granted in fields which are not patentable such as software and business methods.

(b) "technology transfer agreement" means a patent licensing agreement, a know-how licensing agreement, a software copyright licensing agreement or a mixed patent, know-how or software copyright licensing agreement, including any such agreement containing provisions which relate to the sale and purchase of products or which relate to the licensing of other intellectual property rights or the assignment of intellectual property rights, provided that those provisions do not constitute the primary object of the agreement and are directly related to the production of the contract products; assignments of patents, know-how, software copyrigh ...[+++]t or a combination thereof where part of the risk associated with the exploitation of the technology remains with the assignor, in particular where the sum payable in consideration of the assignment is dependent on the turnover obtained by the assignee in respect of products produced with the assigned technology, the quantity of such products produced or the number of operations carried out employing the technology, shall also be deemed to be technology transfer agreements;

(c) "reciprocal agreement" means a technology transfer agreement where two undertakings grant each other, in the same or separate contracts, a patent licence, a know-how licence, a software copyright licence or a mixed patent, know-how or software copyright licence and where these licences concern competing technologies or can be used for the production of competing products;

(d) "non-reciprocal agreement" means a technology transfer agreement where one undertaking grants another undertaking a patent licence, a know-how licence, a software copyright licence or a mixed patent, know-how or software copyright licence, or where two undertakings grant each other such a licence but where these licences do not concern competing technologies and cannot be used for the production of competing products;

The necessity to create transparency and legal certainty with respect to patent protection of software-related inventions is being actively discussed in the follow-up to the Green Paper on Innovation and the Green Paper on the Community Patent [20]: