Patents do not protect those with little financial resource. It takes very big bux to fight the corporate pirates who have surveillance of newly registered patents and use the ideas flagrantly. You have to fight them which becomes impossible without heavy pockets and a lot of luck and influence.

Patent Attorney was to go ahead and produce my last development, market with good records [verified and witnessed] at all stages to protect from being sued for your own invention / development.

And, of course, the damage isn’t just to the companies, but to innovation itself, as people just give up due to being restricted in what they can do — including having some companies give up on the US market entirely:

Among those who had not received a demand, some reported significant impacts from watching others receive them. Numerous respondents who had not received a demand said they used open source software in order to avoid liability. Others reported being very conscious of patent threats. Said one small software company, for example: “[w]e have limited ourselves to the UK & European markets, simply because the mere threat of Patent Litigation if we enter the US market, is a WHEN not IF question.” Another said “I used to develop software for retail and on spec for publishing by other companies. But we’ve quit that because the risk of patent litigation.”

Hopefully as we start to see more data like this, policymakers will realize that the system is very, very broken.

Patents are now so broad and litigation so ubiquitous that innovation, which patents are supposed to encourage, is being actively prevented.

It was the Australian Institute of Patent & Trade Mark Attorneys who support getting rid of “as such”. They wrote a detailed submission about how problematic it was.

On the MoBIE/MED website at the link:

http://www.med.govt.nz/business/intellectual-property/patents/draft-guidelines-patents-involving-computer-programs/submissions

you can download the submission that the Institute made on draft IPONZ guidelines attempting to implement the select committee’s clause 15 (3A). Paragraph 12 of that submission says:

“There is perhaps still an opportunity to insert an additional clause in the Patents Bill to clarify the meaning of clause 15(3A) (as in, for example, Europe where the blanket exclusion is read together with a separate clause containing the qualifying expression ‘as such’ that clearly limits the scope of the exclusion). For the purposes of commenting on the Guideline we will assume that the exclusion will be treated in a similar way to the restriction in Europe and the UK.”

That, to me, reads as an endorsement of the government’s suggested change – “a separate clause containing the qualifying expression ‘as such’ that clearly limits the scope of the exclusion”.

Perhaps you and Mr Cunliffe should do your homework before you make statements in the house about who supports your cause.

“Robbed by an Ogre again?”

I’m not a predator type Al1en.
Eating Human would be like eating Dolphin, just not as intelligent.

And ever eaten from a foodbank Alien? I have.

Robbed by an Ogre again?

Yes … this is what Bessen et al call the Notice Problem, because the boundaries are (often deliberately) obscure, it fails one of the key test of a property system (certainty of subject). In fact the recent Akamai v Limelight the court pointed out that infringement can be split in parts (though curiously the liability must still be a single actor). Given that even the judiciary tacitly admit the problem

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/05/top-judge-ditching-software-patents-a-bad-solution/
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/07/judge-blasts-colleagues-for-defying-scotus-allowing-financial-patent/
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/07/why-there-are-too-many-patents-in-america/259725/

what should NZ do? It is too small to have the patent volume to create caselaw. UK is tied to the EPO which seems to be blithly ignoring Article 52 of the EPT, and Australia seems to forgotten the rules of rugby in favor of gridiron (http://keionline.org/node/1516). The least unfavorable option is to use 10A to give the Freedom to Operate for Kiwis within the EEZ by legislative fiat and hope the rest of the world doesn’t go to softpat armageddon in the meantime.

The world can operate by different football codes, the EU have soccer, the US gridiron, and NZ ICT firms can stick to rugby where a fast-moving back line beats knocking/block-heads any day. Just so long as NZ parliament follows the law-making procedures (via Select Committee) and not attempt to change the goalposts.