A FEW DAYS ago we saw headlines about Apple "filing [patents] in Australia [for] all Aspects of Siri in Relation to Home Automation" (essentially software patents). We hadn't lost sight of Australia, where software patents basically remained a problem.

"They just want to market themselves for software patents in the continent."Recently we saw Griffith Hack, a law firm, alleging that "Australia’s Raising the Bar IP law reforms have created a system that makes oppositions quicker and delivers greater certainty." The article about Australian patent oppositions is actually shameless self-promotion, as is typical from such sites. We have grown accustomed to that. This same site also published -- we presume for a fee -- shameless self-promotion from Australian patent law firm FB Rice, which has been pushing for software patents for quite some time [1, 2, 3]. "This is the first part of a two-part series and deals with the current state of software patents," it said. "The second part will provide our prediction on where software patents will go in the future."

They just want to market themselves for software patents in the continent. AJ Park, which operates in Australia and New Zealand (where software patents are effectively banned in spite of AJ Park's heavy lobbying over the years [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]), is still at it, having published in that same site "Should innovation patents be kept?"

In our assessment, AJ Park has been one of the most villainous forces for software patents in New Zealand if not in Australia too. These firms need to be watched as their corrupting influence in policy is well documented. ⬆