"'Technical field' means an industrial field of application requiring the use of controllable forces of nature to obtain predictable results in the physical world."This, he says, "covers every possible way of sensing the immaterial data produced by the computer while the software is running to produce an effect perceptible and usable by a machine or human being."Lobbying group the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure welcomed the report."Rocard's outline contains all the necessary ingredients for a Directive that achieves what most member state governments say they want to achieve: to exclude computer programs from patentability while allowing computer-controlled technical inventions to be patented," said FFII President Hartmut Pilch.But EICTA, a European industry body representing Microsoft, IBM and many other tech companies, expressed concern over some of the proposed amendments."While it is acknowledged that there may be room for further improving the definition of 'technical contribution' as it stands in the Common Position, any definition or test based on 'controllable forces of nature' or 'physical forces' would exclude patents for intangible inventions, e.g. speech coding, communication protocols, radio signal handling, error correction, data compression etc., all of which are currently patentable and traditionally have been patentable for decades," said EICTA, in a statement.