Re: [Australia-public-discuss] cutting the red tape

[Ciarán O'Riordan]

Daniel Black <address@hidden> writes:
> (http://www.acip.gov.au/reviews/all-reviews/review-innovation-patent-system/)
> recommendations on patents to http://cuttingredtape.gov.au/

Keep in mind that these are "innovation patents", not the usual patents.
Duration only 8 years, easier to get, little or no examination done on
applications unless they go to court:

http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Innovation_patent
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Innovation_patent#Australia.27s_system

Are these used against software developers?  They could be, but I haven't
heard of it happening.

But maybe this is an opportunity to tell the government that if they want to
cut down on red tape they need to remove certain categories of things from
the normal patent system.  Such as software.

Some politicians believe raising standards is an answer, but this won't
reduce administrative work.  It might result in rejecting twice as many
applications, but the same number of applications still have to be examined.
It might deter a small number of applications, but it could also increase
workload if the increased rejections lead to applications being submitted
multiple times with tweaks to pass the new test.  On balance I'd expect very
little change in workload.

But excluding a domain from patentability leads to a clear reduction in
administrative load.  If you remove software, then software patents don't
have to be examined at all, and there'd be no point in re-submitting a
rejected application.

My suggestion for a submission would be: "exclude software from innovation
patents, and doing the same for normal patents would be an even bigger
saving".


-- 
Ciarán O'Riordan
+32 (0) 485 118 029
http://ciaran.compsoc.com/

http://EndSoftwarePatents.org/ - http://en.swpat.org/