The british daily newspaper "The Independent" has an article by Charles Arthur titled "The patenting of software is a complete mess and discourages innovation". The article explains the reasoning that leads to software patents and points to the abstract nature of software innovation as one of the reasons why the results are unsatisfactory. The article mentions the European Patent Office's handling of the Amazon patent but not the september vote of the European Parliament.
For the problem of abstraction see also
TAMAI Tetsuo 1998: Abstraction-orientedness of software
On the Amazon case see
