Open Source Society pleads Patents Bill amendment

There is still an opportunity to defuse a simmering dispute over the future status of software patents, the president of the New Zealand Open Source Society, David Lane, said after meeting with government officials.

 Lane met yesterday with officials from the Business, Innovation and Employment and Foreign and Trade ministries and said he was convinced they had the "best intentions". Commerce Minister Craig Foss disappointed large tracks of the software industry last month when he announced the Government would amend the Patents Bill.

Source Stuff.co.nz

Guess who supports [the NZOSS] fix to the Patents Bill?

"As you probably all know, Fisher & Paykel Appliances (FPA) has been the only prominent NZ company opposing the Patents Bill, on the grounds that it might prevent patents on its appliances containing embedded software. That may be a reasonable concern, although not one that was ever a real risk. But unfortunately, instead of suggesting an express carve-out for embedded software to allay that concern, some patent attorneys have instead used the claimed "threat" to FPA to demand that the entire software patent exclusion be scrapped."

According to an OIA request, all they were really asking for was a specific exclusion for embedded software from the general exclusion

"Clause 15(3A) should be amended to include an express "carve out" to allow patents for "embedded systems", such as programmed controllers for washing machines, dishwashers, refrigerators and other whiteware."

Source NZOSS-Openchat

New Zealand bans software patents, but with a few loopholes

Whether or not the patent system is actually helpful in its current form, we leave to the legal and technical experts. But here’s a jurisdiction that has taken quite a radical approach: New Zealand. ZDNet reports that the New Zealand government is moving ahead with plans to ban software patents.

[A] memoradum that explains the Patents Bill amendment states the following:

Rather than excluding a computer program from being a patentable invention, new clause 10A clarifies that a computer program is not an invention for the purposes of the Bill (and that this prevents anything from being an invention, only to the extent that a patent or an application relates to a computer program as such).

According to the New Zealand Open Source Society, the use of the phrase “as such” at the end of the memorandum has opened a loophole that can be easily exploited.

Source Android Authority

Meanwhile The Register is reporting

"New Zealand has passed legislation which partially forbids the granting of software patents – but has come under trenchant criticism by the NZ Open Source Society for abandoning local developers."

Source The Register

All other sources I've found, incuding the parliamentary order paper, are reporting that the law hasn't passed yet so it's highly likely that they have misinterpreted the situation.

Source NZ Parliament

Govt accused of Patent Bills 'betrayal'

The New Zealand Open Source Society reacted angrily to the [Patents] bill's new wording in a blog post. "With the removal of the explicit software patent exclusion, and the addition of two tiny words, 'as such', Foss has more or less thrown Kiwi software developers under a bus," it said. The minister might believe he had struck a "clever compromise", but the clarification represented "a legal loophole the size of a bus", it said.

Stuff.co.nz

Qualified support to draft patent guideline by NZOSS

The New Zealand Open Source Society was given a briefing by the IPONZ office of the MED and their president, Don Christie, says:

"When MED walked us through it, we found we were largely in agreement, we went into the meeting thinking software that merely improves the operation of the computer itself could be patented under the guideline.

"On careful reading, the guideline makes it clear that efficiency gains are only a relevant test for inventions containing embedded software, not the operation of general-purpose computers. The guideline also distinguishes physical effects from logical effects — merely transforming or displaying information is not a physical effect.

"NZOSS believes there is room to improve the guideline ..."

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Original released under a CC BY creative commons licence.