Select Committee Rejects Software Patents

MattP225 · **Joined:** Sun Feb 28, 2010 1:34 pm **Posts:** 19

Great news there.

Pervach · **Posted:** Thu Oct 07, 2010 2:20 pm

Here is the text of the bill.

inkybutton · **Joined:** Wed Oct 06, 2010 9:46 pm **Posts:** 9

There will be a public debate about this in Auckland next week!
If you are in Auckland you may like to attend the IEEE Software Patents Debate, a public debate around software patents (no surprise there.) It's hosted by the student branch of IEEE at University of Auckland, and features some well-known speakers from both sides of the argument.

Details are on the University of Auckland Linux Users Group mailing list, but here are the event detail:

Place: Engineering Building, Room Eng1439 (ask at reception if you're lost), 22 Symonds Street.
Time: Friday 15 October, 7pm-8:30pm.

Parking on the streets nearby is free after 6pm.

See you there,
Noel.

Pervach · **Posted:** Fri Oct 08, 2010 8:12 pm

I'll be there. Won't cause a fuss there unless there's a few of us though - ask hard questions to the speakers and what not.

Who else can make it?

inkybutton · **Joined:** Wed Oct 06, 2010 9:46 pm **Posts:** 9

Video of the debate is now up on Youtube.

An irony: I did not wish to watch the video with the Flash-based video player (Flash is proprietary and largely obsolete) , and so I chose to enable the HTML5 video beta (http://www.youtube.com/html5), which enables me to watch videos with the built-in browser video player. However, it didn't work. Why? Because the HTML5 video Youtube offers is encoded in the H.264 codec, which is encumbered with patents and restrictive terms. I was trying to watch the video in Firefox, which does not have a decoder for it due to the patents, expensive licence fees, and the developers not wanting to contribute to the patent-encumbered codec becoming the de-facto standard for HTML5 video encoding. So, I was unable to watch a video about patents because of patents. Brilliant.

In retrospect, I should have voiced this problem in response to one of the pro-patent debaters claiming that patents have not negatively affected open source projects. However, that person has made an interesting point later - perhaps all the negative press, ridiculous examples of, and lawsuits around software patents are the minority.(Or perhaps not.) This shows that the laws of software patents cannot be discredited solely based upon individual cases, but perhaps also through why it's a bad idea anyway.

Pervach · **Posted:** Tue Jun 21, 2011 9:58 am

uh oh, here we go. We all knew this was going to happen sooner or later.

Quote:

The Government may need to go back to the drawing board over the way software patents will be treated under its proposed Patents Bill [...] Microsoft New Zealand legal counsel Waldo Kuipers hoped dissatisfaction with the separate guidelines, which are designed to accompany the legislation and address the specific issue of embedded software, would open the door to a fundamental rethink.

Select Committee Rejects Software Patents

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