The WTO's Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), particularly Article 27, is occasionally referenced in the political debate on the international legal framework for the patentability of software, and on whether software and computer-implemented inventions should be considered as a field of technology.
However, according to Paul Hartnack, former Comptroller-General of the UK Patent Office, it is arguable whether pure software is a technology, or is, in many cases, capable of industrial application.
He argues that its acceptance as such under European jurisdiction would be a political matter based on economic interest.
Its relevance for patentability in the domains of, for example, computer-implemented business methods, computer science and software information technology remains uncertain, since the TRIPS agreement is subject to interpretation,[4] like all legal texts.
Article 10 paragraph 1 of TRIPS provides that a computer program is a type of work which is eligible for protection under copyright law: Computer programs, whether in source or object code, shall be protected as literary works under the Berne Convention (1971).This argument was used by some adversaries[5] of software patents to contend that software patents would not be allowed by the TRIPS agreement.