The situation is a lot more nuanced than that. After all, this is a German company holding mp3 patents. While software itself is not patentable in Europe (or, for that matter, in the US; they argue that it's not software but a process or a "method and a device" that they are patenting), there is a lot of wiggling around the law that results in software patents still being applicable.

http://fsfe.org/campaigns/swpat/swpat.en.html