IP Lawyers and their blogs

The IP law community continues to peddle half truths about the New Zealand Patent Bill and the status of computer software. I notice that they never allow comments on their blogs which means that their misleading contentions are never challenged by people that actually understand software engineering. Readers will probably find lots of instances of this but compare the NZ Computer Society's newsletter on the latest information from MED with that of Baldwins IP. Keep in mind that the NZCS is our professional body...Baldwins is not.

Here is the NZCS article (scroll through the newsletter) http://www.nzcs.org.nz/newsletter/article/162

and here is Chris Way of Baldwins http://www.baldwins.com/re-compute-patentability-of-software-in-new-zea…

I sent the following email to Chris Way. I look forward to a dialogue opening up on his blog:

Dear Chris

In your blog post you write...

"Those involved in ICT will understand the difficulty in categorising
software innovations into two boxes - patentable and non-patentable
developments - but the somewhat simplistic approach taken by the Select
Commitee [sic] that proposed the exclusion has added to the problem. "

You, like many others in your profession chose to misrepresent the law.
there is no categorising of software into two boxes. There are computer
programs and physical devices - the latter may be driven by the former.
The physical devices are patentable, the computer programs are not. End
of story.

If you gave your readers to opportunity to correct these sort of errors
then you  would not have to keep making them.

There are clear and well understood tests to differentiate between
physical devices and computer programs. If you open up comments to your
blog I would be happy to explain these to you and your readership.

Cheers
Don