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Software Patents Stopped in India
piyushranjan writes "Indian parliament deleted the section from the patents bill regrading the software patents as left parties prevailed over the Government on the issue. This may be a major victory for free software foundation(fsf) which has been lobbying hard against the bill."
The government was required by the WTO to adopt a new patent regime in the pharmaceutical sector. There was plenty of opposition to this, mainly from the left, though leaving the WTO is simply not an option and everyone realises that.
So what the government does is have a temporary ordinance, not ratified by the parliament, that's somewhat more draconian that it needs to be. I think the software patents thing was one of those items that the government was always willing to chop. There were also lots of safeguards in the pharma sector itself (regarding making of generic drugs in the national interest), allowed by the WTO, that the government omitted from the ordinance. Even the New York Times had a strong editorial criticising the Indian Government for its unnecessarily restrictive ordinance.
When the time comes to pass it through parliament, voila, the government "accommodates" the left parties by introducing these safeguards and removing things like software patents. The left, in return, supports the bill. And everyone's happy.
No. An American company selling in India is not subject to software patents in respect of the products sold in India because India has no software patents. An Indian company selling in America is subject to software patents in respect of the products sold in America because America does have software patents.
An Indian company can apply for software patents in America which will be valid in America, just like anyone else. Those patents won't be valid in India regardless of where you company is based.
Mod the parent DOWN.
It only shows he knows nothing of the Indian President. Here are some facts so people can see for themselves:
Some of his speeches
A description of a personal encounter
His own website describing his aspirations
A few of his accomplishments
Finally, for those REALLY interested, here's his auto-biography
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
Stanford owns pagerank.
= PT O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm &r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,285,999.WKU.&OS=PN/6,285,999&RS =PN/6,285,999
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1
Yeah, but, Google has an exclusive license to it from Stanford until 2011. So, no other American companies can use it until then....
of course, if you're in a country that doesn't have software patents, then you might not have that problem.
This is a terrible detriment to Indian companies because they will not get to patent their software while other competing countries will (like the US, etc.) The other countries' companies can then enforce the patent against Indian companies, effectively blocking them out of developing software. Because of the lack of patents, Indian companies won't be able to cross license deals with other companies and will be left out in the cold, unable to write certain code. Software patents suck, but like nuclear bombs, once someone gets one, everyone needs one.
On the other hand, Copyright Laws are international and know no bounds (but the chinese borders maybe), and they apply fully to software creation (copyright is what backs the GPL-like licenses).
The very point is that software patents aren't needed and are unnecessary, because not only they'd be redundant if they were always used well, but they're dangerous (for innovation, what they're supposed to protect mind you) when misused.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Google hasn't just patented their page rank algorithm. They've patented the idea of giving weight to the links that point to a page. (The competitors seem to be infringing that claim, probably because they are confident that the claim would be tossed by a court, but who knows?).
We could probably live with patents that protect precisely what the inventor invented, but no patent lawyer would settle for that. Instead, the claims generalize to the point of trying to block any conceivable competition, even with wholly new algorithms.
it would seem that India would be an ideal place for most such companies, as they can operate over there with out fear of patent litigation.
But as we have seen - countries can boycott those who don't fall into line. If India doesn't do what Europe and America is doing then they will have to survive a economic stand-off. If they can then they will change things. However I suspect if they don't adopt our view or accept our patents as protected ideas then our governments will put pressure on those who do business with them. Who knows, I'm really drunk. It isn't good news for those of us who still wish to enter the IT market in America.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Richard Stallman had explained this very nicely in a speech against software patents:
In other words, software patents today mostly protect big companies, so it's no surprise that they are the ones who support them the most.
The transcript of the speech can be found here. Despite the odd transcription error, it's a great read.
The sad part is: India didnt reject swpats because it thought it was the right thing to do - it rejected them because not doing so would have caused the left to get difficult, which would have caused the bill to stall.
In short, it wasn't because the government was convinced that swpats were bad, but because they found that the remaining stuff that they needed to push through was more important to them.
Sadly, despite all the good press, the mentality remains unchanged, and I am certain there will be more attempts very soon.
You aren't remembered for doing what is expected of you