Slashdot Mirror
Software Now Un-Patentable In New Zealand
A few weeks ago New Zealand Software decided to grant software patents. But now
"Despite what appears to be a big-budget lobbying effort by the pro-patent fraternity, Hon Simon Power announced today that he wouldn't be modifying the proposed Patents Bill hence software will be un-patentable once the Bill passes into law.
This is significant. As we've previously pointed out software patents aren't black and white, and there are certainly pros and cons. However on balance, we believe they represent a far greater risk to smaller NZ-based software providers than opportunity, and there are many cases where they have significantly stifled innovation.
We believe it's near impossible for software to be developed without breaching some of the hundreds of thousands of software patents awarded around the world, hence many software companies in New Zealand, creating outstanding and innovative software, live a constant risk that their entire business will be wound up overnight due to litigious action by a patent holder.
This has led to many a 'patent troll' company, primarily in the US. These are non-software companies who exist only to buy up old patents with the sole intention of suing innovative software companies for apparent breach of these patents. The effects of this have been chilling."
Hopefully this marks the beginning of more like-mindedness thinking in other countries.
There should be some ramifications to the ACTA kerfuffle, which is always welcome IMO.
I tried to think of a good sig, and this wasn't it.
place to live everyday. The took away farm subsidiaries and now they have four times the output. No more patenting ideas that you will never try to build and sell, only to sue some other poor soul who's trying to make his life better. Not to mention the climate of NZ looks quite appealing. Imagine where touch tech would be today if some dipshit in the 80's hadn't locked it up in patents? The touch tech of the movies could already be common place.
"There might be intelligent beings created by God in outer space even if there are none here on Earth." -Anonymous
If the New Zealand government manages to get the bill enacted without bowing to pressure from foreign patent trolls, then New Zealand will be a safe habour for genuine software firms wanting to get on with developing software. If the New Zealand Software Industry now booms, hopefully other regulators will take note.
Historians will look back and see patent trolling as one of those mad schemes of the first decade of the 21st Century, alongside subprime mortgages, leveraged investment vehicles and so on.
My little Linux and tech blog
remember the clause in the Q Public Licence that says "if you want to initiate legal procedings, you have to do it in a Norwegian court", well I have an amendment for the other OSS licences :)
It won't matter if the USA doesn't do the same if every other country follows this change.
It could help/protect open source software since they only make source available. Now they don't have to worry about breaking the law (in NZ) in doing so. Will this lead to the U.S. blocking NZ sites?
Please let us know these "worthy" patents.
Compression is application of maths (not patentable). In any case, without compression, digital effects on movies would be impossible. Sales of movies would be still on VHS or Laserdisk. No digital theatres to get us away from our Home Theatres. Therefore IN THE INTERESTS OF MAKING MONEY, the entertainment industry would have invested in digital compression.
Just like the BBC did: http://diracvideo.org/about-dirac/
Because the BBC had a need and that need was cheaper to fill with compression techniques made available, compression would have been paid for by the BBC. The patents however allow monopoly rent, so rather than pay the license fees, they made their own.
Think about that.
When you sell copies, most of the work is done in the original work. This is what your comment is saying too. Therefore that cost has to be amortised over the licensing costs. This would (or should) mean that the cost of licensing that product, each product sold should be much less than the cost of developing that product. But for the BBC, this was not the case. It was cheaper to do all that work themselves than pay the amortised cost that lots of other people are paying for. This MUST mean that the original developers of all the compression techniques have made their money back many-fold. Either that or the BBC was going to be their ONLY customer...
If such robber baron rates are possible, then patents were the only reason it was possible.
If patents made them possible, they were being abused.
Therefore, the compression patents are a MASSIVE drain on the economy.
Since they are only an economic incentive created by government fiat, they should be removed. Sucks for the owners, but they've already made multiple times the development cost already, so hardly sucks at all. And with less money spent on old rope, there's more to be spent in PRODUCTIVE activities.
> this wouldn't help a NZ company if they sell outside NZ, correct?
The NZ government only has decision making power in NZ. For where they have power, they've decided to make companies safe. What NZ is doing is great and should be applauded and helped. It's up to the US government to make companies safe in the US.
On the international level, this sends two messages to other countries: 1. Countries aren't obliged to do what the US says regarding patent policy; 2. Abolition of software patents is a reasonable choice for developed countries.
These messages contribute to saner patent policy in other countries in the future, even in the US.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
What could happen is that some company realizes that the only thing really holding them back is the competitive advantage amazon controls in it's one-click patent. If only they could implement one-click shopping they'd take the world by storm. So, they relocate to Auckland, set up shop and relaunch their website now with all the glory of one-click. When they make their first billion dollars, instead of paying $250 million in taxes to the US, now the kiwis get it.
If this happens for real, the rest of the world should harmonize to NZ standards. Right politicians and lawyers, harmonization is important, isn't it?
Belief is the currency of delusion.
You're fundamentally misunderstanding patents. If you patent your software technique, that absolutely does prevent me from reimplementing it in a novel way. In fact, that's exactly the purpose of a patent: it prevents your competitors from using your idea. Not your specific implementation, but any implementation of your idea. You think the terms should be much shorter, so how much shorter? How about three years? How great do you think your computing experience would be today if every new idea in computing that's less than three years old was the exclusive property of a single firm and couldn't be reimplemented by competitors (or even F/OSS software, which obviously could never pay license fees on patents)?
...because I copy code that others have explicitly given me permission to copy without paying them royalties, the same way I allow others to copy my code? If there's already a good solution to the problem you're trying to solve that you can use with an include statement, why in the world wouldn't you? How could you possibly consider it productive to needlessly duplicate someone else's work when you could be busy building something new and useful of your own? Regardless, patents have nothing to do with copying code, but rather with implementing algorithms.
If a problem has been solved, the only reason you would want a different one is if it does a better job at solving that problem (or if you find it amusing to find a new solution, which is a perfectly valid reason to pursue solutions, but not of any particular benefit to society at large). You may want different solutions for subtly different problems, but if you're dealing with the same problem in either case, the optimal solution will always be optimal.
If I need a data structure that I can allocate dynamically and traverse cheaply in one direction, then I want a singly linked list. If you patent the singly linked list and force me to look for a different solution, I'm not going to find a better one, and it's unlikely that even the most brilliant minds in computer science would find a better solution. What you will end up with are myriad sub-optimal solutions being used all over the place not because it makes any sense to use them, but because no one can use the one that does make sense. In reality, you just end up with things like VP8, which is, as I understand it, remarkably similar but slightly inferior to H.264. It does the job, it works well enough, but it's still not quite as good as what it's working around. That's the kind of "innovation" you get from software patents.
Now, as for the good type of innovation you seem to insist can only arise from restrictive licensing of mathematical concepts---more efficient solutions to existing problems, or modified solutions that solve subtly different problems more effectively---we have volumes full of algorithms that constitute exactly those sorts of innovations, and the vast majority of them predate software patents.