[wellylug] NZ Software Patents

Bruce Hoult bruce at hoult.org
Wed Jun 17 16:58:40 NZST 2009


As there have not been software patents in NZ before, Is there the
potential for a "gold rush" with people getting NZ patents on things
that are already patented elsewhere?  Even worse, on things for which
the patents has already expired elsewhere.

I'm not too worried about someone patenting the XOR cursor in NZ, but
what about patents on things that arguably *are* patentable? e.g. LZW
compression, or RSA encryption.

If this was possible the it would be a disaster for NZ. Any amount of
software that currently uses those out-of-patent technologies would no
longer be able to be use in NZ.

Obviously this is stupid. "Couldn't happen" I'm sure you'll say.

I sure hope that's correct.



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