Acknowledgments

We thank our partners in the Study of the effects of allowing patent claims for computer-implemented inventions for their insights and help. Reinier Bakels was very helpful in answering our questions about legal matters, Bronwyn Hall pointed to relevant references, and Rishab Ghosh kept pressuring us to include more European patent examples. All three reviewed drafts of this paper. We also thank the EU reviewers Alfonso Fuggetta and Manuel Martínez Ribas for their comments.

Robert Plotkin made excellent comments (which we sometimes used literally in the final version of this paper) and we also thank him for our ongoing discussion on the topic of IPR. Erik Josefsson was helpful in pointing us to interesting EU patent applications and for setting up http://gauss.ffii.org/GaussFrontPage as a useful tool for patent research. Dirk-Willem van Gulik draw our attention to the importance of Chinese walls between software developers and patent attorneys. Paul E. Merrell pointed to inaccuracies in our draft descriptions of what is patentable and his suggestions greatly helped to clarify this. Jan van Eijck helped to increase our insight by challenging our assumptions about patents and Jo Lahaye was a stimulating discussion partner on this topic. Finally, we thank the EU project officers Enrica Chiozza and David Callhan for their continued support for this project.