How New Zealand Banned Software Patents Without Violating International Law

Christopher Mims | Quartz | August 28, 2013

What do you do when you’re a small country with a technology industry convinced that innovation requires the banning of software patents, but you’ve signed an international treaty that in theory obliges you to make software patentable? If you’re New Zealand, you simply declare, in a historic and long-debated bit of just-passed legislation, that software isn’t an invention in the first place.

As a result, New Zealand’s new Patents Bill, passed today, guarantees that patents of pure software—that is, software uncoupled from some dedicated new piece of hardware—cannot be granted in New Zealand.