The following news articles suggest that the patents amendment bill, could possibly introduce software patents in India. If this is so, why aren't we(FSF-India) fighting it?
Quoting from http://www.business-standard.com/common/storypage.php?hpFlag=Y&chklogin=...
The Cabinet is expected to clear the promulgation of an Ordinance for the introduction of a product patents regime, which will also cover embedded software and hardware, next Wednesday.
Quoting from http://athens-olympics-2004.newkerala.com/?action=fullnews&id=44168
"Fair use provisions in the copyright law that permits reverse engineering is not permitted under the patent law," said G. Devarajan, general secretary of the All India Forward Bloc. ... "This highly retrograde step would kill the fledgling open source movement in our country, particularly in our universities and institutions like Indian Institutes of Technology," a Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) leader said.
Vijay
--- Vijay Kumar Bagavath Singh vijaykumar@linuxmail.org wrote:
The following news articles suggest that the patents amendment bill, could possibly introduce software patents in India. If this is so, why aren't we(FSF-India) fighting it?
Morning Vijay,
We are concerned about this issue,AFAIK the cabinet has decided that they are yet undecided on this issue.We will fight out any Anti-freedom laws.But don't you think we should listen to what the legal experts have to say first.
Thank you for the news clips.
Cheers
--arky _____________ _________________________
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A quick note on patent issue:
Going through the proposed amendment I didnt find any clause which will enable software patents in India.
I am not a lawyer, but we had consulted with a few lawyers.
From news reports we understand that Ministry of IT asked changes in
patent law which will make embedded software patentable. We dont have any document on this. The ordinance doesnt seems to be available publicly.
Even if there is no patent for software in the ordinance way the govt is handling the patent amendment is really bad. They seems to be more accountable to WTO rather than people of India.
We need to watch the situation closely. We will have to work closely with other groups fighting patent amendments. It would be nice if people in Delhi can work on getting more informations and networking with other groups fighting the new patent amendment.
Arun.
On Tue, 2004-12-28 at 15:38 +0530, Arun M wrote:
Also please note the worser situation with Medicine patent. (read it together with recent natural disaster)
From personal level i will request free software activists not to
restrict ourself to software patent. Software freedom is just one freedom an individual need.
I am so glad that someone has come up and mentioned this fact. The issue with medicine is far worse and affects far more people in a much more basic way.
I had blogged about it early this month (http://www.sandipb.net/blog/archives/2004/12/02/brazil-to-break-drug- patents/) inspired by the actions of a country ( Brazil) which cares more for its citizens than our country does.
Tehelka had also covered this story a few weeks back.
- Sandip
-- Sandip Bhattacharya * Puroga Technologies * sandip@puroga.com Work: http://www.puroga.com * Home: http://www.sandipb.net
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