Gov't agrees to No Software Patents

We are absolutely thrilled by today's announcement from the Minister of Commerce, Simon Power, stating unequivocally that the Patents Bill will explicitly exclude software patents.

This has been a long and anxious process for us at Egressive, as it has been for many others. We'd like to thank many like minded folk who also put in a lot of their time and energy to help convince our government that this decision is in the best interest of all New Zealanders, including our colleagues in the NZ Open Source Society, NZ Computer Society, InternetNZ, and a host of New Zealand's most successful and innovative commercial software developers like Orion Health and Jade.

This is major victory for open and transparent process in NZ law making. We are very pleased to have been a part of it.

Our remaining patent-related concern is the set of guidelines which IPONZ will need to prepare for patenting devices with embedded software with interest. Given the many multinational entities with a vested interest in patents, who will be stinging from this resounding set-back to their "intellectual property"-based market protection strategies and will no doubt be keen to influence the proceedings, we will be watching IPONZ's progress with interest.