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NZ Draft Bill Rules Out Software Patents
Korgan writes "In what must be a first in the face of ACTA and US trade negotiations pressure, a Parliamentary select committee has released a draft bill that explicitly declares that software will no longer be patentable in New Zealand. FTA: 'Open source software champions have been influential in excluding software from the scope of patents in the new Patents Bill. Clause 15 of the draft Bill, as reported back from the Commerce Select Committee, lists a number of classes of invention which should not be patentable and includes the sub-clause "a computer program is not a patentable invention."'"
It's still only a draft.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Well, first you need a visa. Which probably requires a job or student-status. You haven't applied for that. I expect you'll also need a passport, which you still haven't applied for even though I've been reminding you for months. I mean, jeeze, you can get a passport photo at freakin' WALMART. So really it's just that you can't be bothered to start making progress on it.
Oh, and your mom called.
Software (meaning the code) is copyrightable and should not be patentable.
Let me give you an oversimplified example:
* Take 100 programmers from this website (rookies, dinosaurs and everything in between)
* Assign them all the exact same task: write software to solve a specific business problem
* Require them all to work in isolation so there can be no sharing of ideas or solutions
* On your marks, get ready, go!
Chances are that most (if not all) will come up with a solution that addresses the specific problem that needed to be solved (as well as assorted other features and functionality because, hey, we are programmers). There is also a very good chance that more than one will come up with the same solution, or similar enough that it would "qualify" as a patent violation. So, who gets the patent?
* Is it the first person to finish, even if their solution is clumsy or inelegant or inefficient?
* Is it the best solution? Who judges this?
* What about the people who came up with the same (or similar) solutions independently?
* Should whomever gets the patent be able to sue the other 99 people for patent infringement just because they arrived at a similar or different business solution independently?
That's one of the basic problems with software patents. And that alone is enough to make me think software patents are just a bad idea.
I've never really followed the arguments behind why everyone hates software patents. I'm not trolling here, please help me understand. As I understand it, the idea behind a patent is to encourage an inventor to invest resources in R&D and then to share their new techniology with society, in return for a time-limited monopoly on exploiting that new technology. This is arguably a bit broken at the moment -- largely because patents seem to be overly broad and to last too long -- but the basic idea seems sound.
See http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2010/03/19/software-patents/
The software patent system may be in need of repair, but is it really worth throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
It's too broken, too fundamentally broken, to fix.
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
I imagine you could still patent the concept as long as it was implemented as firmware but I assume the patent could not be used to stop others implementing the concept in software. Standard disclaimers - IANAL. I haven't RTFA.
You also apparently either don't understand what firmware is, or what software is. (Your software doesn't cease to be software if it's burned into non-reprogrammable memory. Not all software is firmware, but all firmware is software. It's just software recorded on non-erasable chip media. Heck, often these days it's erasable too. Not as easily as when it's saved on disk, but still... software doesn't cease being software merely because you change the media you save it on.)
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Patenting an algorithm is not really like patenting an invention. It's more like patenting a mathematical law or a scientific discovery. If someone comes up with a new way to factor large numbers, they should get a Nobel Prize, not a market monopoly and a private island (unless you can buy a private island for cost of your Nobel Prize award).
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Draft bill. Not final. Not to worry. An army of lobbyists is already on a flight to NZ to "correct" the situation before it passes.
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