At 11:07 AM 8/18/2009, Raj Mathur wrote: ... >Afarid I'm going to be nitpicking here, but we really need a formal >opinion on whether use of MP3 is illegal in India or not. The Fedora >page says, ``The MP3 patents are protected by United States law and >international treaties, and the Fedora Project will honor the applicable >laws and treaties.''. However there is no treaty that enforces US >software patents in India to the best of my knowledge. Of course, the >fact that India does not have software patents at all could have >something to do with that :) ...
I see this page on TRIPS and Software Patents: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_TRIPs_Agreement Apparently, the applicability of the TRIPS agreement to Software Patents is very much "Open to Interpretation". Now moving on to TRIPS and India... I see this on the Dept of Industrial Policy and Promotion's website (http://dipp.nic.in/ipr.htm): "India is also a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The WTO agreement, inter-alia, contains an agreement on IP, namely, the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS). This Agreement made protection of intellectual property an enforceable obligation of the Member States. TRIPS Agreement sets out minimum standards of intellectual property protection for Member States." Thus, it appears that for India, the decision on software patents will depend on the applicability of TRIPS to the area of Software Patents. Now here comes the interesting part (from the wikipedia article): "However, there have been no dispute settlement procedures regarding software patents." The above means that the TRIPS agreement has not been tested so far in any case related to software patents. And of course, by 'tested' we mean that no dispute related to software patents has so far been brought before WTO's dispute settlement body. I expect that such a dispute settlement procedure will ... errrr.... settle the matter. I'm no expert on WTO. But if someone is, I hope they will comment on the above. -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
