NZ Software Giants Join Patent Bill Protest

Updated: govt says "no" New Zealand’s largest software exporters, Jade and Orion Healthcare, have lined up with the NZ Open Source Society, InternetNZ, and local industry lobby NZRise to ask the government to revise its proposed patent laws.

The bill is designed to remove software from patent protection in New Zealand. At the same time, however, parliament sought to ensure that software in embedded systems would still be patentable.

Its approach was to insert the words “as such” in the legislation:

    10A(1) A computer program is not an invention for the purposes of this Act...