The forces backing and opposing software patents in Europe have a new football to kick around. It's called the European Patent Litigation Agreement or EPLA, a proposal for an international treaty that would establish a new European patent court.

Florian Mueller, the founder of the NoSoftwarePatents campaign that last year defeated the proposed directive that would have sanctioned software patents in the European Union, claims this tactics is more dangerous than the last.

"From a software patents point-of-view," he says, the EPLA would have far worse consequences than the rejected patentability directive would have had: not only would software patents become more enforceable in Europe but patent holders would also be encouraged to litigate."

He also complains about an expected "doubling or tripling of the total cost of litigation" per patent dispute.

Despite the downfall of last year's directive, the European Patent Office (EPO) has since 1973 granted tens of thousands of software patents, which can only be enforced country-by-country. Mueller says the anti-patent crowd figures the government officials who support patents would stuff the EPLA with like-minded jurists and that software patents would become further entrenched.

At a hearing in Brussels on Wednesday the EU's internal market commissioner Charlie McCreevy, regarded by anti-patent folk as a pawn of Microsoft, supported the EPLA as a "promising route" and said that he had instructed his staff to move forward with the proposal. McCreevy was a big supporter of the defeated directive.

EPLA supporters include the Fraunhofer Institute, which invented the MP3 format, Bosch, Qualcomm, Siemens, Thomson, the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company NV (EADS), the aerospace company, and ProTon, the organization of university researchers.

Mueller expects the European Commission to ask the European Court of Justice whether the EU has to get involved in ratifying the EPLA proposal or whether it could be done by any member state to avoid an upset in the European Parliament like last year.

(This story appeared originally in Client Server News.)