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."'"

Comments

Keep up the pressure.

[BiggerIsBetter]

It's still only a draft.

Re:Why Not?

[Drishmung]

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.

Re:Why Not?

[osu-neko]

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).