The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Black-and-white, with some grey areas

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Wednesday, Sep 24, 2008
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Black-and-white, with some grey areas

Anand Parthasarathy

IT majors see the patents issue as that linked with intellectual property

Bangalore: For the mainstream global IT players, software patenting is a clear-cut issue, and they have no time for ifs and buts: They are for it. In the wake of the ongoing public consultations on the Patent Manual, which throws up issues related to software patenting, The Hindu spoke to India leaders of some key IT players to find out what they thought:

Naresh Gupta, Sr. Vice President, Print & Publishing Business Unit Adobe, and Managing Director, Adobe India, a leader of the imaging software and solutions business, says: “We believe in safeguarding of intellectual property rights. Adobe invests significant resources towards innovation and we expect protection of our Intellectual Property Rights, to be able to sustain business.”

Chip leader Intel responded with a statement of the company’s position on IPR, from Bruce Sewell, US-based senior vice-president and general counsel of Intel Corporation: “Intellectual property is an important component of any standard. It can be used to shape the standard and ensure that people can understand the risks and costs of participating. That’s important if you want the standard to be broadly applicable and widely adopted.”

From his academic vantage point as Director of the Indian Institute of Information Technology — Bangalore (IIIT-B), S. Sadagopan, provided a somewhat nuanced view: “Software in many countries (including India) is covered under copyright and not patent; the inventors want to ‘protect’ their invention so that they get the credit and ‘copycats’ have no ‘free ride.’ With the success of IT, software patents can be very lucrative; often such ‘greed’ leads to ‘overdoing’ of the protection. In turn, it leads to the other extreme reaction that denounces any protection.”

Success story

“MP3 has been an enormously successful case of software patent; but it is perhaps just one among the handful of such hugely successful ones!” Prof Sadagopan adds: “Many of us would like a moderate regime, where algorithms are not patented; of course, there must be some protection available for unusual algorithms and implementations that have immediate product implications (like MP3).”

Clearly software patents is a black-and-white issue for the larger industry players — but outside experts might find some shades of grey in the scenario.

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