04.06.17
Gemini version available ♊︎LexOrbis is Wrong About Software Patents
Summary: The latest attempt (among many) by IAM and its affiliates to push for software patents in India even though India neither needs nor wants such a ludicrous thing
WE habitually write about the ban on software patents in India because law firms and their large clients (IBM, Microsoft etc.) keep challenging this ban, no matter how rational it is for a country with an economy and an industry like India’s — a topic covered here many times before.
“He bemoans India’s insistence on doing the right thing for its people and its businesses.”The latest to challenge this ban is Joginder Singh of LexOrbis (greedy law firm that IAM keeps publishing for). He bemoans India’s insistence on doing the right thing for its people and its businesses. IAM blindly reposts this as “international report,” but it’s hardly a report, it’s just marketing. it’s advertising. Example of nonsense from a non-programmer: “copyright law does not protect the basic idea behind the software code.”
As a programmer myself (since my early teens), I can immediately call nonsense on that. Even terms like “software code” are somewhat inane and are expected from people who don’t understand that software is code, or that code is software. Here are Singh’s concluding words with our comments in yellow: “the situation has remained unchanged [oh, poor you! Think about the poor patent law firms!]. The patent office has issued manuals and guidelines to streamline its practices and procedures, and the tribunals and courts have provided some judicial precedents [as they certainly should]. However, more clarification is needed [same propaganda that the patent maximalism lobby uses in the US right now, “clarity”/”clarification”]. For example, the denial of patent protection under the per se exclusion must be limited to those aspects covered by copyright law [that statement makes no sense as all code is copyrighted]. Considering that the same piece of source code can be written in many different ways and different programming languages, and the copyright law protects only the literal copying of software code, copyright law cannot provide adequate protection to software-driven inventions [so you want to patent or copyright binaries now?]. The copyright law does not protect the basic idea behind the software code [formulations of commands are more like recipes, not ideas]. The functional and technical aspects of software-driven inventions [oh, that’s a new dodge, “software-driven inventions” instead of “software patents” or CII] ought to be patentable considering that it is the improvements in software that significantly affect the performance of hardware.” [no, software does not enhance the “performance of hardware”; hardware just runs software]
That’s just one paragraph. Given the amount of such nonsense that IAM spews out on an almost daily basis, we cannot do a rebuttal of everything but instead point out that IAM has been very busy shaming India for software patents (we have lost count of how many times IAM has already done that this year alone), in what can only be characterised as a twisted, self-serving lobbying campaign. That's just what IAM does, with or without direct help from the outside. █
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