On Wednesday 18 Jun 2008 09:56, Kenneth Gonsalves wrote:
On 17-Jun-08, at 8:29 PM, jtd wrote:
On Tuesday 17 Jun 2008 07:05, Kenneth Gonsalves wrote:
hi,
we would appreciate comments and feedback on this:
"Hence, even though the Standards adopted by a country should be aligned to the international standards but they need to be adapted for local requirements and should ensure that there are no unfair royalty payments made."
thanks for taking the trouble to go through the document and give feedback. It *is* a bit time consuming, but if academia, industry and the community can create something for the governement to measure its actions, maybe good will come of it.
The least the community can do is support those spending time.
Also the article focuses on the need for standards and the related problem of keeping them free of IPR encumberances. But it does not effectively address the root cause of encumberances - software and business methods patents. The "per-se" term must be removed from Indian patent law with a clear single line statement Software and business methods cannot be patented. Attempts to obfusicate this by describing hardware in terms of HDL (or hardware with some software in rom / cpld / pgas etc) should also be clearly cited as not patentable. Thus a piece of hardware maybe patented however it's description (which is what an HDL is essentially) or the resultant output from a piece of hardware (actions of a piece of hardware controlled by a piece of software) cannot be patented.
Essentially electronic machines are mathematical processing machines which result in some output. There are very large number of element permutations and combinations which could produce the same result. Thus the only way a patent could work would be to patent the result and the process. In short one would have to patent 1+1=2 cause someone else can do 1+.5+.5=2. The whole idea of software (or even electronic device) patents is so utterly ridiculous it's a wonder that the law permits that.
Rgds JTD