Stories by: Paul Meller

Alison Brimelow, president of the European Patent Office, has referred the deeply contentious question about how to assess the patentability of software-related inventions to her office's top appeals body, the enlarged board of appeal (EBoA), the EPO said late Friday.

European Telecommunications Commissioner Viviane Reding won glowing praise for her vision of the Internet 3.0 Monday from Vint Cerf, one of the creators of the Web and now Google's vice president and chief Internet evangelist.

Should European governments favor open-source software when they hold tenders for public contracts? Economists and policy makers appear to think so but industry giants including Microsoft argue that this would be discriminatory and are considering legal action to prevent this from happening.

Broadband access to the internet should be a universal service for all European Union citizens, the European Commission said Thursday as it launched a debate on the issue with policy makers, industry and the public.

As tensions mount over the global trade in IT products, the European Commission has called for a broad discussion among all producer countries about what goods should and should not be slapped with customs duties, as well as talks on other barriers to trade, commonly called non-tariff barriers.

Google will half the length of time it holds data linking surfers' IP addresses to their Web searches.

The European Commission is about to slap new antitrust charges on Intel, this time for trying to squeeze rival chip maker Advanced Micro Devices out of some of Europe's most important technology retail stores, according to a person familiar with the situation.

The retail price of text messaging while roaming should initially be capped at close to Euro 0.11 (AUD$0.18) per message, but then fall toward a long-term goal of around Euro 0.04 per message, the European Commissioner for the Information Society said Tuesday, unveiling plans to regulate the market for mobile phone messaging in Europe.

The European Commission confirmed it has received a complaint about Microsoft's business practices from a British government agency this week, but isn't following it up as it normally would with an antitrust complaint, according to a press officer.

Microsoft has won a year-long quest to make its Office Open XML document format an ISO-recognised international standard.

Chip maker Intel fielded its chief executive Paul Otellini to defend the company's business practices at an antitrust hearing in Brussels this week.