The European Parliament has dismissed a bill that would have allowed liberal patenting of software.
The European Union (EU) Parliament late last week threw out an existing patent directive, paving the way for the entire issue to be examined again from scratch.
Florian Mueller, campaign manager for an anti-patents organisation, hailed the EU decision in an email.
Germany's Bundestag had also passed a directive in support of the EU Parliament stance, he said.
Software patents in Europe are supported by Microsoft and opposed by Mueller's www.nosoftwarepatents.org effort, supported by open-source companies Red Hat and MySQL, among others.
Meanwhile, hundreds of demonstrators from several European countries converged on European capital Brussels to protest software patents.
The demonstration was organised by a group called the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII).