 However, some regional offices exist, such as the European Patent Office (EPO), which act as supranational bodies with the power to grant patents which can then be brought into effect in the member states, and an international procedure also exists for filing a single international application under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), which can then give rise to patent protection in most countries.These different countries and regional offices have different standards for granting patents.This is particularly true of software or computer-implemented inventions, especially where the software is implementing a business method.