[Nz-public-discuss] Fw: [NZOSS-Openchat] the June 2010 swpat Official Information Act release

[Ciarán O'Riordan]

There are some patent threads this month on the NZOSS list:
http://lists.nzoss.org.nz/pipermail/openchat/2012-August/thread.html

Here's a mail I sent:
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I just read this for the first time:
http://devcentre.org/www/oia_patents.pdf

It's the fifty-page document released by the government in response to
Peter Harrisson's OIA request after MS and IBM had their cosy little
meeting with the MED in June 2010.

(Already discussed somewhere?  I can't find anything in the archives.)

I've made an inventory of the document's contents on the wiki:

http://en.swpat.org/wiki/IBM_and_MS_deciding_New_Zealand_legislation

Some highlights:

* NZICT's 7-page policy proposal is detailed and is a good template for
  how NZOSS (or ESP New Zealand?) should prepare a counter-proposal
  explaining why the software patent ban is so necessary.  It's endorsed
  verbatim by Microsoft, and although it bares NZICT's name, it
  strangely says "Prepared with the assistance of NZICT" at the bottom
  of each page. As if they didn't actually write it. No surprise really.

* The comments and policy submissions all come from MS, IBM, and NZICT
  (which MS and IBM fund).  Pingar (the NZ SME at the meeting) made no
  contribution, before and after the meeting, which confirms the
  suspicion that this was a meeting for foreign software megacorps
  rather than an NZ industry meeting.

* And the Business Software Alliance made a written submission, which
  further confirms the previous point and raises the question of who was
  notified that the MED was taking submissions for something?

* There was also a meeting on 7 May with MS and MED (possibly others but
  there's no details, see page 5 - could be worth a second OIA request)

* On 23 June, McLeod said there would be no change and they "would be
  implementing the Select Committee's approach", which sounds like the
  software patent ban will go ahead, but on 25 June, Hassett (MED)
  reported that NZICT (pro-swpat) "were happy that their concerns had
  been met" (p44, last paragraph). There seems to be a misunderstanding
  somewhere.  Maybe swpats were already back at this point!

* Comical email from the clumsy lawyer who blogged the confidential
  report (p49): "No longer any evidence left! Even Google doesn't show
  any cache on this."  D'oh!

* The meeting summary from MED's Warren Hassett is probably worth a
  read, pages 43-45

* And so is the proposed next steps from NZICT, pages 39-42

Any help with documenting the contents would be welcome, particularly
those two documents in pages 39-45.

The wiki's publicly editable.  The page name can be changed too.

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

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