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● 05.09.16

●● Australian Recommendation Against Software Patents is Still in the News

Posted in Australia, Patents at 2:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Even though much of the Australian and the international media focused on copyright-related findings of Australia’s Productivity Commission, the findings against software patents continue to be mentioned to this date

At the start of this month and end of last month we wrote about an Australian recommendation to abolish software patents for good. Some corporate media came to cover it several days later (even over a week later), under the headline “Australian Gov’t. Body Recommends Banning Software Patents”. Here are the opening paragraphs:

=> an Australian recommendation to abolish software patents for good | ↺ “Australian Gov’t. Body Recommends Banning Software Patents”

Australia’s Productivity Commission wants to exclude business methods and software from patentable subject matter under that country’s laws.The APC’s draft report on Australia’s “Intellectual Property Arrangements” called for a patent law amendment to explicitly exclude those types of inventions from patent protection.There is a “clear case” to disallow the patenting of software and business methods because there’s evidence that patents in those areas don’t encourage new or valuable innovation, the draft issued April 29 said. What’s more, such patents can impede competition.

Having contacted some Australian activists against software patents about this, I was surprised to see that they hadn’t noticed, probably because the media mostly focused on other findings of the Commission, mostly copyright-related. Here are Peter Caporn and Rebecca Hembling from Wrays, an Australia law firm, mentioning this aspect somewhere towards the end of their new analysis:

=> ↺ their new analysis

Business Methods and Software (BM&S)The Commission suggests that their newly characterised technology subset ‘BM&S’ should be specifically excluded from patent protection. Patents on this technology is said to be ‘unnecessary’, a conclusion bound to inspire a robust response. The Commission has adopted a narrow view of how ip relating to business methods and software is used and the impact it has. It will be particularly interesting to see if the reasoning set out as support for this draft recommendation survives the submissions that it will no doubt attract in response.

It sure looks like much of the media either missed or overlooked this one particular aspect of the findings, which is somewhat of a shame. If nobody notices or takes into account such input, will it have a lasting impact? █

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