Patenting Software

There have been active discussions regarding the patentability of computer programs lately, especially with the European Parliment considering the software patent directive as drafted by European Commission. There are heaps of websites discussing this issue from those against software patenting to those sorta for it (this one is a really good blog).

Whatever it is, a clear direction is needed as IP protection for software is so hazy as to the length and breadth of the protection being sought, as it can be done under a copyright or a patent. A patent would provide for better protection since this would be dependent on the scope of the claims as recited and this can be made as broad as possible as long as it was not anticipated by any prior art.

Of course MS had to be involved in this and seek to use the law by applying for patents here in NZ with the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand, which has a history with software patents with past headliners include the infamous DE Technologies and the Amazon one-click patents. This is because the patent law in NZ has lagged behind compared to other countries (its based on the UK 1949 act, although there is a new patents act in the making) while technology has advanced so quickly that the antiquated definitions cannot cope with the concept of software and the like. For example, patents for software were originally not found to be allowable since they did not satisfy the definition of an invention and was junked into the same category of business methods and schemes (also not allowable), but people bypassed this by claiming a computer that ran the software, thus providing a vendible product that was deemed to be an invention.

The latest MS act concerns XML and is causing a flap in the IT industry. The scope of the protection can be found in the claims within the complete specification, which can be viewed by clicking on 'patent search' and entering the patent number 525484 and clicking on the PDF file. It claims:

A computer-readable medium having computer-executable components, comprising:

• a first component for reading a word-processor document stored as a single XML file;
• a second component that utilizes an XSD for interpreting the word-processor document;
• and a third component for performing an action on the word-processor document.

It was filed in the US in 2002 and what is recited was not known at that time, although to give MS credit, they applied with one of the most overloaded patent offices (another article here (a word document))

Personally, i feel we might look back at all this in the future and laugh, as all the software we is open source format, making this debate rather pointless.

The New Paper also did two reports on this which were mildly interesting but really did not state anything new.